Under The Brown Hat

Random Humor: Emo-Vulcans

2010-06-13T13:17:00.003-04:00

Question: Why have Emo-Vulcans not caught on?

Good Answer: The apparent non-existence of Emo-Vulcans is due to an incompatibility of ideologies between Emo culture and Vulcans.

Real Answer: They cut themselves with Occam's Razor.

Thoughts on Cuccinelli's Pro Gay Discrimination Stance

2010-03-06T10:10:00.003-05:00

Via. The Daily Progress:

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli sent a letter to Virginia’s public colleges and universities on Thursday that advises them to rescind their policies banning discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Cuccinelli, a Republican from Fairfax County, told the schools that only the General Assembly has the authority to establish legally protected classes of Virginians. The GOP-led House of Delegates has shot down legislation on numerous occasions that sought to add protections against discrimination for gays and lesbians.

Cuccinelli’s confidential letter, obtained Friday by The Daily Progress, says universities may not include “sexual orientation,” “gender identity” or “gender expression” in their nondiscrimination policies.
“I am aware that several Virginia colleges and universities have included ‘sexual orientation’ in their respective policies,” Cuccinelli wrote. “For the reasons stated, any college or university that has done so has acted without proper authority. Such invalid policies create, at a minimum, confusion about the law and, at worst, a litany of instances in which the school’s operation would need to change in order to come into conformance. Accordingly, I would advise the boards of each college to take appropriate actions to bring their policies in conformance with the law and public policy of Virginia.”

I don't think I'm being the least bit manipulative by saying Cuccinelli has a "Pro Gay Discrimination" stance. Some might be able to rationalize from the above that he is simply out to enforce the law, and from all accounts does appear to be correct that, "only the General Assembly has the authority to establish legally protected classes of Virginians" as opposed to the schools themselves. Why now (did he really just become aware that they were doing this?), though? Why this?

His answer: "Such invalid policies create, at a minimum, confusion about the law and, at worst, a litany of instances in which the school’s operation would need to change in order to come into conformance."

That's right, creating confusion about the laws of the state, is a minimum concern for him in this case, meaning that he is not just doing this for mere reasons of enforcement and adherence like some might say coming to his defense; this is not just paperwork. Instead, he's made perfectly clear that his main concern, the worst case scenario is that, "the school’s operation would need to change in order to come into conformance." I'm sorry if I'm beating people over the head with this, but I can't help but spell it out. He's saying that the worst thing that could happen if schools implement a non-discrimination of gays policy is that, uh, some people might have to not discriminate gays in conformance to said policy. If that's his priority of concern, that some people may be deprived of their administrative right to discriminate against homosexuals, then he is indisputably pro gay discrimination.

It also slays me that he says that the schools "would need to change" their operation to deal with such a policy of opposed to gay discrimination. Has he simply not hung out at a major state college for about the last six years. These policies have been established. They were present all the time I was at UVA and when my fiancee worked as a resident adviser at William and Mary she was also trained to handle cases of discrimination based on sexual orientation. The only change most school will have to face is the stripping of policies they have long self-enforced based on their own principles of human decency and equality so that they can conform to a general assembly that has repeatedly deprived them of the formal right to do so. Isn't this the kind of state interference Republicans are supposed to be, in principle, fundamentally against?

And let's not forget that by discrimination, we're talking particularly, but far from exclusively, about hiring discrimination. So again, a Republican--of the party that is supposed to be helping increase jobs--decided that in our current economic situation it was a good time to stir up an established policy (legal or not) of equality and decency, and by doing so potentially deprive a substantial demographic of job opportunities. Niiiice.

Finally, I cannot end this without addressing a major concern about language. Cuccinelli isn't just saying we should have discrimination against gays, or homosexuals (if the first term could be misconstrued somehow to leave out lesbians,) what he explicitly says according to the Daily Progress is that "universities may not include 'sexual orientation,' 'gender identity' or 'gender expression' in their nondiscrimination policies" (quotations modified). By this token, he's purposely or inadvertently going after all the alphabet groups, and not just bisexuals and transgender individuals, he's leaving the entire discourse of gender politics to the wolves. Among students and teachers alike, unless harassment can be explicitly construed as sexual, it's up for grabs. Being butch, tomboy, effeminate, 'girly' ... it dosen't matter if you are heterosexual at the end of the day, there is virtually total freedom to discriminate any gendered expression of self according to this.

Great job.

‘Welcome to the Jungle of the UnReal’: Thoughts on Avatar, the 00’s, and the Rise of the Blue Pill

2010-03-06T00:41:00.003-05:00

(Note: This is a spoiler heavy piece. Not just of Avatar, but also of numerous other films. If you start to read a sentence with a film in it, be warned that you might know the ending of that film or at least it's big twist by the end of that same sentence. Also, though there are some real links in this ... I kinda played around with coloring text for certain effects, so if you find you can't get a link to work, in some cases that might be due to it having never been a link. It also means some jokes may be lost to people reading this as plain text from a source other than my blog.)

Every time I sit down to write about Avatar, I end up overwhelmed by the number of things to discuss. I find myself outlining essays in my head, sometimes even small books. It always turns into something too big, something I don’t have the time or energy for, and perhaps even something I just don’t have the desire to write. I saw it only few weeks after it came out, and I’m only now getting something on my blog about it.

You see, one of the most difficult things about Avatar for me is that it was a film I enjoyed immensely … and yet didn’t like. I’m at a loss for another clear example of this. I don’t mean that it was a guilty pleasure, a film I know “sucks” but enjoy anyway. I mean literally that I had fun watching it, I enjoyed the characters, the action scenes, the special effects, yet walked out unable to not complain, to not gripe and nitpick. It’s like being allergic to chocolate. It tastes delicious, until the reaction kicks in.

So what about the film do I dislike? Is it how the plot is heavily derivative? Is it that it’s, as I’ve heard so many say, ‘Dances With Wolves in Space’?

Actually … no. Though I agree that the basic narrative of colonialism that it is playing with has been played with to death – that I would rather see aspects of colonialism such as the effects of outsiders imposing artificial (usually profit motivated) boarders incongruous with the natural cultural divides which lead to ethnic and sectarian violence – I actually agree that the ‘in Space’ clause is more than a new coat of paint over the same old fence.

So is it the terrible writing? The poor dialogue perhaps? Again, I liked the cheesy characters and enjoyed the over-the-top quality of them. Ironically, as liberal as I am, I was more troubled by the preachy political commentary even more than my relatively conservative friends. Still, as loud as I vocally groaned at that ‘Na’vi are terrorist’ speech, this was again not really the problem per se.

What about the science? I’ll admit some of the science was hard to embrace. By that I mean the floating islands mainly, and for some reason I forgot about the gravity being lower on Pandora, which explained why the physics of people falling seemed off (10-foot cat people do not drop from that high up and not break bones … on Earth). Still, that’s pretty picky.

So what is my problem?

Avatar is in many ways a pop-cultural ideological bookend, one worth looking over in some length as we are now at the vantage point of a new decade, allowing us to go back and look at it. Avatar is a sort of cinematic conclusion to what Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek call the twentieth century’s “passion for the Real,” the desire to take things to the extreme, seeing the vulgar underbelly, breaking through even reality itself to see the inconceivable void that reality is constructed around to maintain order against. In film, it’s been many things, but most obviously it’s the desire to defy all taboos, to see with unrelenting totality. It is the strive for hyper authenticity in Saving Private Ryan, the exhaustive unflinching onslaught of The Passion of the Christ and the complementary extreme brutality of torture horror (Saw, Hostel, etc.) rising to the status of popular horror (leaving its underground obscurity to take over Hollywood, taking the place of low-gore teen slashers and PG-13 haunted house films). In television it is also the unrelenting proliferation of fully visible surgeries and autopsies in medical and crime dramas.

In addition to violence, the passion for the real has persisted in the extremes of sex. In the first chapter Zizek’s book, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, he offers Oshima’s ‘Empire of the Senses’ (usually titled ‘The Realm of the Senses’ in the States) – a film about a sexual relationship that escalates into violence and self-destruction – as one example of this. More recent films of similar veins are Winterbottom's 9 Songs, which explores the futility and finitude of a relationship built around sex (and arguably materialism through the music that complements their escapades) as opposed to love, featuring graphic unsimulated sex by the actors, Breillat's Anatomy of Hell, where an unstable woman hires a gay male prostitute to stare at her naked exposed body and confront the cultural demonizing of the female sex, and most recently, Von Trier’s Anti-Christ, which seems to combine elements of all three in the form of a psychological horror movie (which rates as one of the very few I’ve had to stop watching).

Then there’s the more sociological Real. For all of the controversy of sexual content in Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut, it is perhaps most fascinating for how it shows the domestic Real: a husband using the bathroom sink (shaving/brushing, I forget at the moment) while his wife is using the toilet. But more than this subtle intrusion of the camera into the taboo private space, the film explores the fantasy of the darker secret underbelly of our world (the place of the insects as depicted in Lynch’s Blue Velvet), for as Eyes Wide Shut progresses, Tom Cruise’s character believes that he has not only ventured into a secret orgy uninvited, but into a conspiratorial society so nefarious that it will commit murder to keep itself secret, only to learn by the end of the film that he’s gotten carried away. He takes a joke to scare him off too far; they really are just a secret orgy sex club. His fantasy however is one of the definitive fantasies of the Real, even if in one of its most subdued forms. It is more commonly seen, as Zizek points out in the same chapter, in works like Peter Wier's The Truman Show, and Philip K. Dick’s novel The Time Out of Joint. It is the solipsist fantasy that the world around us, our reality as a reality, is a façade, at best hiding something darker, and at worst purely artificial. Which of course brings us to the definitive example of the late Nineteen Nineties, the film that Zizek’s book title is a quote from: the Wachowski Brother’s The Matrix. In the film, our reality is a computer simulation to keep us complacent but that people slowly feel out of place in and break out from to reveal how they are being controlled by machines (an under appreciated predecessor to this is of courseAlex Proyas's Dark City, where nearly the same event occurs with aliens).

While Zizek and Badiou are addressing the whole century, I am looking at The Matrix as the preceding bookend with Avatar. Along with Fincher’s Fight Club, it is an apex of the ‘Gen-X’ desire for something more than the mundane, a generation frequently looking back to its symbolic numerical inverse: the Nineteen-sixties, with its revolutions occurring on virtually every level of society (civil rights, feminism, science, music and the other arts, anti-war movements, domestic relations etc.) and wanting that amazing glorified experience for their own adolescence. After all, instead of the gritty exposure to the horrors of war that was Vietnam, we had the media sanitized night vision videogame that was the depicted Gulf War. (I distinctly recall staying up after Johnny Carson and seeing the Desert Storm lightshow and thinking how much it resembled the Martian war games I was playing from five-inch floppies on our old IBM PC.) Sure, there were feminist issues, and gay rights battles to be fought. Environmentalism is never a cause that runs out of urgency. There were the L.A. Riots, which was no small matter, but for the majority of white (let’s be honest) East Coast suburbia, I think its safe to say that the counter culture—a substantial percentage of—was suffering a little bit from ‘rebel without a cause’ syndrome, reading, listening to, and watching (thanks to the movie adaptation and soundtrack of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) Hunter S. Thompson’s “wave speech” and embracing flannel shirts. The media charged battles became more about having more (more sex, drugs, violent content, etc.) than having the right to have at all. The Nineties generation often gets labeled the nihilistic, anarchic generation, and that’s exactly what Fight Club and The Matrix appealed to, the desire for things the crumble, for life to feel more urgent and for issues to have more immediacy, for there to be, as Tom Waits put it, “a world going on, underground.”

With September 11th, we all pretty much got what we thought we wanted. The Aughts was a time of a strong anti-war movement, seemingly more passionate civil-rights issues (gay-rights, immigration) and essentially the kind of political and social antagonisms that the Sixties had glorified through the music and films that remained of them. The only problem was, it all came with the actual price of itself: the death and loss of the Sixties unglorified. Perhaps one of the best symbols of this experience was the conclusion of Bertolucci's The Dreamers, where the sexually decadent upper-middle-class students have their suicide attempt disrupted by a brick smashing through the window as the Sixty-eight French riots reach their street and crash into their world. Like Neo, having taken the red pill and awakened from the matrix, staring at the destroyed cityscape, we were welcomed “to the desert of the Real.” And as Zizek and many others pointed out, the millions of us not running in the streets of New York reacted very much in the same way as we did to the images of the Gulf War, comparing it a video game, to narrative media. We assimilated back into a familiar text the intrinsic event that ruptured our insular realities, referring to the experience again and again as ‘cinematic.’

The ‘passion for the Real’ wasn’t completely stifled at this point – this was the actual moment when popular torture horror came to rise, when television shows got really gory – but what followed in cinema was again this fixation with assimilating the intrinsic into narrative order. We became saturated in prequels, ‘origin films.’ The great monsters from the Seventies to Nineties needed to be explained away. We needed to know Hannibal Lector’s childhood misfortunes with the Nazis and the economic conditions of Leatherface’s family that made both men into cannibals. Perhaps most significant was the Rob Zombie's Halloween remake, which took Michael Myers, a figure whose horror was that he was a force of pure inexplicable evil (even credited as “The Shape” in the John Carpenter original) and explained away his upbringing and harsh family conditions. Monsters were no longer allowed to be monsters. Much as we had done with the red scare in the 50s, Hollywood needed to assert the kind of authoritative institution that diagnosed Norman Bates in Psycho and Cody Jarrett in White Heat, and even hunted down the queen ants in Them!, only, instead of displaying a competent institution, Hollywood needed nothing but the power of narrative.

(And on a side note, it wasn’t just villains, but heroes! Batman Begins, as well as nearly every other superhero movie of the decade has began at the very beginning of the heroes emergence and devoted its first film to explaining why they are the super beings they are. In this regard one the greatest villains of the Aughts was the Heath Ledger Joker from The Dark Knight, whom repeatedly tells victims his origin story, “You want to know how I got these scars?” only to tell a totally different story to the next person, refusing to be anything but—as the films score emphasizes with his theme music—a one-note character. He is evil without depth, and ironically as such is unfathomable.)

The End of the Passion

Where with most decades there is a sense of spillover from one period to another, that what people mean by the Sixties is really the Mid-sixties, or how punk music is seen as a Seventies phenomenon when its main phase is more that of the Late-seventies to Mid-eighties for example, the Aughts were a neatly framed decade, cut off from the Nineties by both the Bush administration and September 11th and then largely felt to be concluded (as in the sense of a chapter with many things continuing on in the next under different conditions) with Obama’s inauguration. In some ways the cut feels too neat, as if the same act of imposing narrative on the intrinsic event that kick-started the Aughts had spread down through the entire decade. I voted for Obama, and yet even I was taken back by the sheer scale of the spectacle that was his inauguration. While under any number of contexts I understand people’s sense of jubilation (I wasn’t exactly depressed myself), there was something of a sense of absolute enthusiasm and optimism—that ‘everything was going to be fine now’ about the whole event that I couldn’t help but be a little disturbed by. It was as if, the symbol was enough. Even Obama himself cautioned everyone not to get too excited, but it was only after a few months of things not magically changing (I honestly think some people thought the economy was going to instantly be fixed the moment he took office) that reality sunk in and we could turn on the television without being bombarded by ads for commemorative plates.

On some level, I can’t help but see the event as one of the first indications of a serious popular change, at least in the consumerist counter culture from the ‘passion the Real’ to a kind of passion of the UnReal. I don’t mean to sound like a conservative. (I am after all talking about a term used by two of the most radical leftist intellectuals alive.) It’s genuinely not a criticism of Obama that I am trying to articulate, but one of that desire for him to do the miraculous, to be more and do more than an idealist president in a politically divisive country with a massive debt to deal with can be expected to do. I’m critical of the desire for Obama to allow us to stop worrying about the future, to stop being critical, and above all to allow us to say, “everything is going to be okay.” I fully sympathize with the desire; we’ve had eight years of color-coded fear assaulted upon us by the Bush administration, let alone the actual terrorists. It can hardly be blamed of anyone.

But wait, what the hell does all this have to do with big blue cat people in space? Am I trying to imply that, despite all the other escapist films of the decade (and lets not forget the damn Zombies with all their films of cathartic release, providing us unhuman humans we can massively kill and mutilate without moral conflict), Avatar is somehow special (perhaps because it’s in really fancy 3D?) in how it marks our desire to be escapist and not engage in the political system’s realities?

No … and yes.

Avatar is more than just pure escapism. The ironic twist of films like The Matrix was that they always offered escapism with an anti-escapist message. They were fantasies of the Real to indulge our ‘passion for the Real.’ Avatar on the other hand, despite its showy revolution resisting the evil corporate colonial empire, in no way seeks to indulge any sense of the ‘passion for the Real’ whatsoever. Instead of indulging an audience of Neos, it seems better fit for an audience of Cyphers – Cypher being the double-crossing member of the human resistance against the machines who, having like the others also taken the red pill and seen the “desert of the Real,” asks Neo with rhetoric cynicism “why didn’t I take the blue pill?”

Like Neo, Jake Sully of Avatar has a key moment where he awakes in another world that changes his perceptions of virtually everything, but unlike Neo, his is a ‘jungle of the UnReal.’ He does not awake to discover the weakness of his own flesh, long atrophied from a life as a digital avatar in the matrix, where he was capable of superhuman powers limited only by the illusion of limits (“There is no spoon”). He is instead a crippled man who leaves the limitations of his flesh to embrace a giant, superhuman avatar of a Na’vi – which is, in terrible appropriateness, blue.

When I said above that I felt that the film was more than ‘Dances With Wolves in Space’, that it was more than a new coat of paint on an old fence, I meant that the derivative nature of these two elements is not being considered by most critics for exactly what the function of each element is and are together. In using the Dances With Wolves formula and following it to a nearly monotonous tee, Cameron is breaking away from the narrative formula of ‘passion of the Real’ films. There is no grand reveal in Avatar. There is no formal artificial world, with a curtain we are not supposed to look behind and then somebody does. There is no Fight Club, Sixth Sense, Matrix plot twist (don’t forget, people seeing the film for the first time did not know what the ‘matrix’ of The Matrix was). Reality is never warped. Even with the evocative spectacle of the great tree falling down, everything is mapped out for us in advance, depriving us of an intrinsic event. We almost always know what’s going to happen next.

Then there is the paint, the blue paint which is the ‘in Space’ part. What is largely seen as Avatar’s original concept is how the alien world is completely connected – not in the Disney's The Lion King “circle of life,” Pocahontas “paint with all the colors of the wind” sense, but as a complete biological network—network as in, literally, Pandora is a massive organic computer network (and yes, when the animal reinforcements come at the end to fight beside the Na’vi, it is the equivalent result of the tree sending out a massive Twitter event) and everything has a USB Port. (The closest we get to a twist is this general ecological discovery, but it’s so drawn out and paced that there is never a sense of something big being revealed, even when it technically is in Sigourney Weaver’s big speech.)

The cyber punk genre has of course been dealing with humans wiring their brains to the internet since at least William Gibson’s Neuromancer, with the Ghost in the Shell franchise being a notable bridge between that groundbreaking work and The Matrix, which of course is also working with this idea, but in all of these works we see again and again the tension between man and machine. At best there is a unsettlingly nihilistic indifference to the issue, seen often in Gibson’s work, but more commonly, like in Ghost in the Shell, we see an existential anxiety brought on by digitalization of the soul. In The Matrix there is even a moral prerogative to liberate the unconsciously enslaved people from their artificial lives as in mecha utero sleeping batteries for the machines’ super-generators. When Cronenburg explored the further softening (‘soft’ being rather in the William S. Burroughsian sense of the word) of the machine with the in utero nature or our reclined electronic modern lifestyle in his film EXistenZ (probably the closest thing to a cinematic predecessor to Avatar’s bio-net), a film where VR gamming involves organic controls that look like something out of an anti-stem-cell research activist’s worse nightmare, we see his sexualized matrix end with a crisis of realities. Where Major from Ghost in the Shell questions if her digitalization has made her no longer human, the players in EXistenZ become too close to the illusionary world so that by the end they are never certain when or if they are really out of the game. In Avatar, there is nothing like this (though it is food-for-thought when regarding the reports of post-Avatar depression of late), because there is no machine, no cold metal or biomechanical intermediary to call artificial; there is only the ‘great tree’ (another evocation of Disney’s Pocahontas), which in a fashion not unlike Pinocchio’s blue fairy, makes the Na’vi disguised puppet avatar controlled by Jake Sully into, “a real boy!”—I mean Na’vi—at the film’s end.

This is what troubles me about Avatar. There is no literal illusionary world like the matrix, but in place of one there is … a CGI created, completely illusionary 3D heightened world that’s purported to be real. The tangible actor becomes digital entity in a much more literal sense as Na’vi than as Neo (who was still physically shown and played by his actor, Keanu Reeves, when in his matrix avatar form “Mr. Anderson”). With everything being excused as biological, the film offers an example of how our present day existence, as beings that spend hours upon the web, semi-anonymous, living through avatars in simulated worlds, semi-omnipotent, feeding off an endless flow of information, could in fact be displaying perfectly ‘natural’ behavior in a ‘natural’ world (every WoW player’s dream come true to get their parents off their back!). There is of course no real-life example of such behavior, but that’s the point: Avatar provides us with one, that is what Avatar sells. It even goes a step further, when showing Jake’s real body weakening as he spends more and more time in his avatar, he in one scene suggests that the human world seems less and less real compared to that of the Na’vi. Suddenly the terrible dialogue of the human antagonists and the incomprehensibly heavy-handed preachy political babble of all the humans seems less the work of a sloppy screenwriter (I don’t mean to sound an apologist, but … and as hammy as Titanic might be … James Cameron has had a hell of a track record to be producing lines this bad by accident). There is a seemly deliberate effort not only to make cyberspace natural but meatspace (to use Gibson’s classic term for being outside the matrix) seem unnatural. That is what Avatar threatens, appealing in a much more direct and subversive way to the masses desire for ‘the symbol to be enough’ by saying the symbol IS enough.

The success of Avatar, its record-breaking, phenomenal success, is in many ways a sign to me that we are more and more prone to taking the blue pill. I think the success of The Dark Night and Watchmen were oddly foreshadowing – both films ending with the moral that, sometimes to keep order, to do the right thing and save the day, the masses need a massive lie (respectively, that Harvey Dent was a good and incorruptible man – Gothem’s “White Knight,” and that there is a super ominous force out there—Dr. Manhattan, or the original graphic novel’s giant alien squid—that has wiped out millions, and that all nations must put aside their differences—i.e., the Cold War—to save the human race from), a fiction to live by. But in both films’ cases their lies were morally problematic, costly, and strikingly cynical in a manner seemingly intended to be labeled as cynical (with the later, the film ends with promise that the lie will even be disclosed). Thus, we can see these not so much as films simply promoting lies, but as films wading in the murky waters of what Zizek proposes as a "third pill." With Avatar, there is no moral dilemma. It was for me a rather belated afterthought when I realized the hero might have potentially betrayed the human race—our very species—in some big real way by preventing the evil corporation from mining unobtainium. It has no examination of itself to suggest such a direction as Zizek insists we need in a post 'passion of the Real'. The film hardly even suggests that there is a red pill to be considered. It just sucks you into its spectacle, saying, ‘welcome, to the jungle of the UnReal.’

I don’t like that.

Otherwise it was pretty fun.

My Top Eleven Video Game Soundtracks Part 7

2010-01-10T20:47:00.002-05:00

With the top eleven finished in parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, this part is about some honorable mentions. They aren't in any real order but the first few were omitted do largely to technicalities that should make clear why a few other choices didn't even make this list despite possibly seeming likely.

Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (NES)

I love Disney's old school cartoon line up, and like many of their movies, found the game adaptations quite good. I have to agree with The Game Heroes that Chip 'N Dale is the best, but as that NES version of the theme song is, it's not an original score. That was a big issue for me throughout this and the reason there are no movie-based games on the list, I wanted the scores to have been composed for the games, not adapted.

The Legend of Zelda (NES)

The only song likely to be more recognizable than the Super Mario Bros. 'exterior theme' is of course the the main theme of Legend of Zelda. It's wonderful. I love it, both the opening title and in game renditions of it, but the rest of the score from the classic original doesn't quite have any weight for me. The dungeon them isn't bad, but I don't love it, and the other jingles though out are really just short jingles, so thats two versions of a song I love and a few other tracks that are ok. Super Mario didn't have many tunes either, but they are ALL classics. Again, one of if not the greatest Nintendo tunes, hands down, but for me one great tune does not a great score make.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Play Station)

I never owned a Play Station, and more than any other, this game made that a painful fact. For years I heard how great the score was, that's sorta the point when you give a game a name like Symphony of the Night. But I have to admit, it's a little hit and miss for me, despite it's epicness, this was not an uncommon phenomenon with (SNES) games for me. For all of the grander and potential, the arrangements for so many games just came off weird. (I hate the Link to the Past version of the Zelda adventure theme.) It's all a little too sweeping and bombastic, sorta like Gothic opera pop. They're trying to be too 'enchanted' sounding. Thus for every track I really like there is two I don't, and not having the in-game experience, I'm just not really able to say how well they flow for the game. A great score in scale, but overall not quite my thing.

Sonic The Hedgehog & the original sequels (Sega Genesis)

I forgot! I suppose that says something about them, but while I didn't have a Sega of my own, I took up every opportunity and my cousins' and friends' houses. Great games, and the opening music is as classic as any of the iconic greats, but a few of the other tunes are me personally hit and miss. More hits than miss, but again this one just didn't have enough something to make it. Much like Legend of Zelda it's loved for a couple tunes passionately, and disregarded for the rest. Still, had I remembered it at the time, it would have been a tough call.

River City Ransom (NES)

When it comes to Beat 'em Ups, Double Dragon was fun, but the music actually got on my nerves. River City Ransom was, for me, so much better on all levels to Double Dragon, including music. I'm much more into these rock 'en roll-surfer-disco influenced hyper-frenetic score. It just worked better for this kind of game for me, even if it was a little more repetitious.

Donkey Kong Country (SNES)

Near the end of the SNES's life they pulled out all the stops with a handful of games that were able to hold their own with the next generation of consoles. Few achieved this quite as well as Donkey Kong Country. Along with its graphics was a wonderful score which fits perfectly with the environment and attitude of the game. I can never really remember the tunes from it, but I always found myself bobbing along to them as I played. They fit perfectly, at the price of sometimes being invisible, which is hardly a detractor.

Super Metroid (SNES)

Now we are talking! Consider this where the excuses stop and I start fully praising games as really tough-call runners up.

I wasn't a big Metroid guy, but more than one fan have argued this as the best SNES game without losing my respect, and goddamn that score. It's like they took everything that was great about the scores to Alien, Aliens, The Terminator, T2 and Blade Runner and combined them with about a dozen other wonderful things. At times really rich and evocative of more fun-going space adventures (a wee hint of Wing Commander I do detect) and at others the score is totally unnerving, laying down all the cues for future sci-fi survival horror games to take note of. It only just barely didn't make the list on account of low nostalgic value for me having not played it much (didn't own it) but I must confess I'm inclined to boot Street Fighter 2 in its place. It's the better, but not precisely the more memorable.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64)

You know how I said the problem with the original was it had one great tune and a few eh numbers? Well, here's the answer to that! A wonderful game, with a vast and rich score filled with numerous tunes That I love. In many ways I can't help but compare it to King's Quest 4, and were this a more fantasy exclusive list... oh yeah, it would have made it. It's epic, but also solid. A really marvelous game. Again, a really hard one to leave out.

Tomb Raider (PC)

Lara Croft became such a ridiculous sex symbol during the major wave of 'pixel tits' heroins in games that it's easy to forget how absolutely wonderful the first game was (well other than the whole running around shooting endangered species part... that was a bit ethically iffy). The sequels I don't think were terrible as far along as I bothered (2 and then a bit of 3) but the formula was something of a case of lightening in a bottle. It was a slow game about exploration, and as the sequels became less about looking at the sublime spaces your played in and more about action... they just lost touch. The first game's score stresses this sense of exploration, of looking off in wonder at the sublime. I love the opening theme and the orchestral accents throughout the game. It was a wonderful score, perhaps loved more for its nostalgia than quality but still a great score of high quality.

I could go on and on and on... Mega Man, Kirby, Star Tropics... there are tons of them! Again, I really recommend checking out Garudoh's massive channel on The Music of Games as well as those from the others I've linked to.

Well, that's it. Feel free to leave comments and opinions. I'd love to hear some suggestions people feel I've left out as this is a personal list more than a best of. What are your favorites, and if not the same, which do you feel are the best?

Horror Movies That Don't Suck: Bedlam (1946)

2010-01-10T17:13:00.003-05:00

Of the Val Lewton Collection I got for Christmas, Bedlam is not the greatest, but it was certainly the most delightful surprise. Having already seen most of the classics like Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and the underrated Leopard Man, not to mention Karloff's finest performance in The Body Snatcher, I was largely under the impression that the remaining films would be much lesser inclusions, but Bedlam is simply amazing. It's a period film set in the late 1730s inspired by the works of Hogarth, and while it's morality might seem a little preachy in its morals, it is a film I could not say really talks down to the viewer.

Anna Lee (Nell Bowan), a moody and sometimes irrational woman who has charmed her way into high society, becomes the rival of Master George Sims (Boris Karloff) when she aims to reform his cruel methods of running Bedlam asylum. When her political influences prove a genuine threat, Master Sims has her committed for her at times spontaneous behavior. Once inside, the film becomes a theatrical showdown. Imagine if you will, a cross between One Flew Over the Cuckcoo's Nest and Marat/Sade without the post-modernism, and even a shade of Shanley's Doubt. Where from her comfy place in society it was easy for Lee to judge his cruel methods, she now finds herself among the beasts, begging a Quaker friend to forsake his vows and give her a weapon to defend herself in the dark. Soon however, she learns to see the inmates as lost souls and rises above her fears to find humility where Sims could only find cynicism.

Sims never makes it easy for her and in the film's most powerful scene he thrusts her into a moral test that goes to the very heart of Lewton's psychological approach to horror. He presents to her a man, a hulking brute caged for being too violent to have among the others and tells her she is to share his cage, that it was one thing to pity the pitiful, but was she really willing to show compassion for someone who could endanger her, who was deeply disturbed, a seemingly true beast, or was all of her idealism just talk. It's a wonderful scene, beautifully shot, where both actors step up their performances and the script suddenly becomes something of literary consideration.

I can't get over how intelligent this film is, and how much credit it gives the viewer to figure things out. It never has the characters stop and explain the politics of the period. It is filled with characters and shots right out of Hogarth paintings, and so much information is conveyed subtly through acting and withing wide shots as opposed to explicit close ups. Take for example the simple cue that Anna has a spade hidden in her skirt to defender herself with during a card game. Any other film of the time would have done a close up right on it, but this simply shows her fingers touch it under her fabric, almost unnoticeable. Director Mark Robinson trusts you to be paying attention and catch it. I don't want to spoil too much, but when the spade is finally used note the implied motive for why. This stuff is startling for a 40s film.

Val Lewton produced and wrote the final drafts (uncredited) for several masterpieces, but as I hear The Leopard Man more and more getting recognized as much, much more than a feeble attempt to milk the Cat People 'franchise' one last time, I feel this is the new under appreciated gem to consider from Lewton's great series of films.

Thoughts on the Harry Reid Controversy

2010-01-10T11:15:00.002-05:00

The outrage over Harry Reid's racist comments is actually one of the more interesting controversies I've heard about in awhile.

I'm not aiming to give him a full defense, but rather I find that with a little analysis and thought, there are a few things about this controversy that are curious and worth contemplating more than mere voter points. Let's look at the quote from Halperin's book that keeps circling around:

He [Reid] was wowed by Obama's oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama -- a "light-skinned" African American "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one," as he said privately. Reid was convinced, in fact, that Obama's race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination.

First let us address the context statement and form of it's offense, then move on to the specific language. What we know about the context of this is that it was said in private; it wasn't a speech or a formal interview. I don't note that because of some acceptance of a politician's personal racism behind doors, but rather because this was something said during the champaign. Rather formal or informal, Reid appears to have been providing campaign analysis on how, 'the country' would respond to Obama, not necessarily how he felt about him. It was an opinion of how voters would react to Obama as a black candidate and why.

This is the problem with comparing it to, say, Imus and the Rutgers women's basketball controversy. The offense comes in a different form, closer actually to the John Kerry on Iraq goof. It isn't that Reid says something offensive towards Obama through which the country responds; it's that Reid says something offensive through Obama towards the country, which then responds. As Kerry, in talking about Bush, ended up (accidentally) implying that American troops were basically dumb highschool drop-outs, Reid in discussing Obama's race as a factor implied that most of the nation is essentially racist. Both for being influenced by race at all and in how.

Something being an opinion in no way relieves it from being offensive or racist, and even if the form differs the content can backfire, which brings us to the language. We have only two direct quotes to examine, that Obama is "light-skinned" and, "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." Again, as presented by Halperin, Reid is essentially saying that 'America is ready for a black president... especially one that isn't too black.' Obama certainly doesn't fall into the stereo-type of liberal 'political blackness', personified by Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson. For all their popularity, neither are strong candidates, but Obama dosen't talk as they do, or act as they do. He is a very different kind of politician from them, if anything perhaps closer to Shirley Chrisholm. However, there is still the word choice. Who on earth still uses the word "Negro"??? If he does mean "Negro dialect" in reference to other black candidates like Sharpton, is it too extreme to say he might as well be calling them monkeys?

This use of Negro to me is the core of Reid's folly with regard to being accused as racist. While not a racial slur, it's a loaded word, an old word with a lot of history. Though, what word should he have used? Black dialect? That's obviously too broad, too many dialects. Low in-come urban/rural dialect? Ah! Dialect is a problem too.

Like Karry, he's wondered into a class tension. Obama isn't acceptable merely because he's not 'too black' but also because he isn't too poor and uneducated. In a weird uneven way, isn't it basically that he's 'white' enough? While it's still projected as what "the country" thinks, we are left still with the monkey angle, which cannot be excused. If one says, 'all these racists aren't ready to treat these monkeys equally', they're still calling someone a monkey. This is specifically what he should be held at fault for, if he isn't. But I think we shouldn't ignore the larger implication of his statement.

The big curiosity of this for me is that Reid has given us an opinion on a very frequently talked about issues of the election: will Obama's race be a factor? Were not many of Obama's critics frequently bringing up that the appeal of finally having a black president was overshadowing the issues, that some people were voting for him because he was black? Were not many who voted for him happy he won because he was black?--alright, perhaps not exclusively, but in part because he was black? I couldn't help but be happy during the inauguration speech, thinking that a whole generation of black children were going to grow up with evidence that their skin would not be an obstacle between them and the highest office in the country. There were other issues, of course, but it certainly was a factor. It was an obstacle for voters looked beyond, for there is in its best intentions a certain reverse racism to it. Which is what I find particularly fascinating about Brian Walsh's statement.

For those who hope to one day live in a color-blind nation it appears Harry Reid is more than a few steps behind them. Unfortunately, this is just the latest in a long history of embarrassing and controversial remarks by the senior Senator from Nevada. He always shares exactly what's on his mind with little regard to perception or consequences, and it's one of the reasons he is the most vulnerable incumbent Senator in either party facing re-election.

In no way does Walsh say racism is ok, but isn't that last sentence odd? "He always shares exactly what's on his mind with little regard to perception or consequences, and it's one of the reasons he is the most vulnerable incumbent Senator in either party facing re-election." Is what is on his mind really the problem, or is it that he says it? When people talk about a color-blind nation, it always sounds so nice and Utopian, but I can't help but wonder if it is a place where racism is broken down and dissolved or a place where it is repressed--or worse, persists in denial. Would a color-blind nation have no racial injustice, or would it simply not see it? In short, after so much talk about Obama's race, is Reid's comment outragious because of it's poor and loaded word choice or because of its implications about society and the voters that make it up? Furthermore, is it upsetting because of how obviously false it is, or because on some level, there's a small element of truth to it? At the risk of sounding contradictory (and slightly pessimistic), I can't help detect in out general fixation on his race, the likely answer. For me, this is the thing to walk away from this pondering.

My Top Eleven Video Game Soundtracks Part 6

2010-01-08T14:16:00.003-05:00

Here we are. The final two!

#2. King's Quest 4: The Perils of Rosella (AGI)

This one is a bit tricky. I've had a heck of a time finding a sample as the AGI version of the game is much rarer than the improved SGI, but this is a rare case where faced with a full orchestral version, one of the first of its kind for a computer game even, I find the blips and beeps version completely the way to go. I have only been able to find one youtube example of this version, and it sounds much clunkier than I recall it. While nostalgia may be the culprit I think I had the polished up re-release of the AGI which was supposed to smooth-out the score a bit.

Whatever version you listen to (overall for game play I recommend the SGI for better in-game sound effects and graphics), the melodies of King's Quest 4 are classic. My personal favorite being the diamond mine of the seven dwarves, I commonly find I still whistle these all the time. Utterly classic, and one of the most beloved video games of my childhood. There was no way this wasn't making the list.

#1. DOOM (PC)

Best soundtrack ever. As blips and beeps or orchestral sweeps I love every note of this game's soundtrack. From the most air guitar inducing opening to the eerie operatic epics (my personal favorite), it's video game perfection. Each song gets you into its level, building urgency, intensity or outright dread. For many, this was the first game to truly scare the crap out of you. No game since to my knowledge has created such a sense of from hell and back as Doom. It's brilliant, and the music lives on as a testament to that.

Well, that's my list! There's one more episode of honorable mentions to come but that may be a bit delayed as it will be a from scratch write up. In the mean time, feel free to leave your own top five, ten, or eleven lists below or wait for that to come out.

My Top Eleven Video Game Soundtracks Part 5

2010-01-08T12:09:00.002-05:00

#4. Super Mario Brothers

It was inevitable. I don't even feel I need to explain it. Probably the most recognizable jingles in gaming history. Constantly covered and parodied. We all know the tunes. I love them. Let's just move on.

#3. The Last Ninja Trilogy (C64)

If there was only one reason I wish I owned a Commodore 64, it's to play The Last Ninja games. Actually, not really play them so much as make it through each insanely difficult level just to hear the score for the next. Like Maniac Mansion, this is a music driven game first and foremost. Unlike Maniac Mansion, there are NO SOUNDS. All three sound channels of the C64 were devoted to music, resulting in a score that made its NES counterparts look like a joke. The first game's score is the greatest chopsocky score ever. The second is a love letter to 80s and early 90s 'in the city' action movies, as well as over the top cheese like Commando and in some respects Lethal Weapon. It's epic and bombastic, at times rather funky. It's like the score to the NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game you always wanted in place of the one you got. The third game had a lot to live up to and one can feel the style of the series starting to get tired, but the music's change in direction is one I've grown to appreciate quite a bit. Instead of another heavy score of building intensity that pumps you up, it is more somber and subtle. It's a more eloquent score, mixing elements of the first two while going very much in its own direction, creating a more atmospheric experience. I find it is often the easiest to listen to as a stand alone work.

Overall the three scores are amazing, with the first being yet another break through and essential in the history of game scores.

My Top Eleven Video Game Soundtracks Part 4

2010-01-07T20:14:00.004-05:00

#6. Quake

The music for the game was programed by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. Need I say more? The rich ambient industrial works composed for the game are eerie as hell and show no lack of attention. I can't help but detect some of Aphex Twin's influence on Reznor, notably with his album Selected Ambient Works: Volume 2. My favorite composition for the game, "Castles of the Damned" with it's saxophone-like wailing, also evokes a rather unappreciated David Bowie track entitled V2 Schneider from the album Heroes, his second collaboration with the godfather of ambient music, Brian Eno. To be drawing from Trent's own musical heroes like this should indicate explicitly that this is as much a work of art for him as any of his albums. As a NIN fan, it's a wonder I don't place this higher on the list. It opened the doors for just how disturbing horror game scores could be. And the next entry illustrates one artist who perhaps more than any other walked through those doors to unnerve the hell out of gamers.

#5. Silent Hill (I-IV)

Normally, I'd feel a little cheap listing four game soundtracks in one place, however, the music for the entire Silent Hill series (at least the official games) has been done by the same composer, Akira Yamaoka and as the series has experimented in its approach (in later games changed developers' hands) his aesthetics have held as the consistent spine of the series. From the classic original's opening theme, to the fourth chapter's Room of Angel, he's a chameleon!

One of my favorite works comes from Silent Hill 3, again, an opening theme, You're Not Here. I just love how effortlessly he seems to make an angsty emo-goth girl pop song that is so much better than... well... the angsty emo-goth girl pop songs that angsty emo-goth girl pop bands like Evanescence and Nightwish produce. But seriously, when I suggested Yamaoka was the follow up to Trent when it came t0 unsettling ambient scores for games, I didn't mean these opening songs, nor the emotional umph he adds to the dramatic moments within the games (though that might be what I love most about him). No, there's another side to Yamaoka, a much, much, much darker side, and god bless him for it. For a game series praised for its stretches of dead silence that put you on edge at 3AM after hours of playing... the spaces between those patch of silence are quite powerful as well.

My Top Eleven Video Game Soundtracks Part 3

2010-01-07T17:24:00.002-05:00

#7. Final Fantasy (I & VI)

Welcome to the first franchise selection, where I pick more than one game from the same series as a sort of tie. Picking Final Fantasy opens up several cans of worms, none so large as the issue of it being an RPG. The problem with addressing RPGs is, were this a top eleven best game soundtracks, it could be filled with nothing but RPGs. Seriously, while many games from other genres incorporate professional composers to score them, since nearly day one RPGs have taken their music very seriously. There are hundreds if not thousands of of RPGs throughout the consoles that have utterly breathtaking scores, from full orchestral numbers to eloquent piano pieces. So, why not Breath of Fire or the often prised Chrono Trigger or the very underrated Lufia series???

Sigh.

I'm not making a top eleven RPG Soundtrack list!!! It's a certain style, and I like it, but it's not everything game music has to offer. Overrated or undisputed, Final Fantasy is the series I played the most and loved the most (though Lufia 2 is really amazing and I highly recommend it). Its scope set the bar for other RPGs. It's tunes are the most instantly recognizable for me of any from the genre. The first game is classic. As for VI (released as III on the SNES in the states) it is my favorite from the series, and in my opinion the peak (I haven't been able to really get into another title until XII, although I must admit IX and X weren't really given a chance, and as sacrilegious as it is, I'm not a VII head). Kafka's theme (3:11) and even the silly Opera piece (4:47) are some of the greatest moments in an overall great series.

My Top Eleven Video Game Soundtracks Part 2

2010-01-07T16:32:00.003-05:00

#9. Street Fighter II: The World Warrior

Were this a list based on which scores were the best, of course Maniac Mansion blows this out of the water, and shamefully too since it is an NES score that's superior to an SNES score. However, Street Fighter II wins over only for game play nostalgic value. I mean, it's Street Fighter 2! For most Americans this was the first major fighting game (not to be confused with beat-'em-ups) to use dynamic music within fights to pull you into the action. While not all the tracks are classic, no song has ever made videogame show down sound quite as epic as Ken's theme (3:06 in the above link). Perhaps the most underrated tune being Blanka's theme (5:06) which is fairly rich. All around, it's a classic.

#8. Zombies Ate My Neighbors

Lucas Arts and Konami... what a pairing. When I covered Maniac Mansion I evoked the film Night of the Creeps, and this game also is very much in that vein, but there was a follow up film from director Fred Dekker that is even more fitting for comparison: The Monster Squad. Like that movie you play kids up against an all star cast of monsters and like Maniac Mansion the soundtrack pulls no punches on the nostalgia. Each tune evokes the toy solider melting glee of the first time you saw Howard Hawks' original The Thing at nine, or THEM! or Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or least we forget Night of the Living Dead. It has that goofy Tails From the Crypt quality to it, mixed with Plan 9 From Outer Space and all the other classics. I love how goofy this soundtrack is. And while some of the tunes add a certain mania to the harder levels that can be trying they are nonetheless wonderful and somewhat cruelly appropriate. It's not an easy game and that insanity actually engages you as you run for dear like though deadly weeds while Dracula and three werewolves chase you around a corner to collide with Frankenstein's lightening hurling monster. Classic.

My Top Eleven Video Game Soundtracks Part 1

2010-01-06T13:33:00.005-05:00

So here's something I meant to get out ages ago and left all but forgotten in my "Blogging Stuff" folder. There's been a lot of attention given lately from nostalgia reviewers at Channel Awesome and it's respective associates to game music of late so I thought I'd dig back through some of the game soundtracks I loved.

A few preliminary things first. You're not going to find Halo 3 or Metal Gear Solid 4 or Assassins Creed 2 on here. I've not played any of them, nor sat through someone else playing them. I'm an old school gamer and I'm not sure I've purchased a game since I picked up Soul Caliber 3 way back when. My first systems were an Odyssey 2 and an IBM computer with two 5-inch floppy drives (you used one to run the operating system disk!) and my last system was a PS2. That's basically my range, give or take, and I certainly haven't covered everything between. I occasionally will sit back and watch a play through, and at least one of these was selected as a result of that, but this is an old school list, composed of games I grew up on or was blown away when later exposed to, and by top eleven, I basically mean top eleven favorite. It's a fuzzy eleven as well, with thought put into the arrangement, but some back and forth about which are better even after completing them. And one thing I really can't stress enough this is a soundtrack/score list, not a best song list. Which means some seemingly obvious choices might not make the list just because they have the greatest song in video gaming history. I'm listing games that have multiple songs (at least three, and even that's pushing it, with an ideal minimum of four) where multiple selections (again, if not all) from each are solid. When I'm done I'll address as few honorable mentions that just didn't make the list and I think you'll see this was somewhat of a reoccurring factor. I'm really not looking to get into a heated battles over which is better with any of these. If you know them, great, if not, I recommend giving them a listen.

Credit also should be given to Garudoh for his amazing youtube channel covering the history of video gaming music. I will link to it among others extensively throughout this.

#11. Dragon Spirit (NES)

Many games have changes in music quality and style from console to console so I'm going to at times stress which version I mean. In this case I found the NES version vastly superior to the arcade versions I found online.

As much as I love Spinal Tap, this is why it's a top eleven list. Perhaps my superior overall love of the other games on the list is a major reason I couldn't knock one out to put this in, but this is a game that's music is too good for an honorable mention in my book. The game while not bad is relatively easy and a little underwhelming, but my god, the music! It captures the scope and adventure of being a dragon flying over vast landscapes like nothing else, sucking you into the action, and making a mostly solid (the boss fights are a little too easy most of the time) but routine top-down flying game feel like a Peter Jackson epic.

Check out this 4-part playthrough by KamilDownna. I think listening to how the music plays with the action will really make clear how amazing an environmental score this is.

# 10. Maniac Mansion (NES)

Again, I only had access to the NES version, and while I'm told the PC was a better game all around I'm going with what I know. And what I know is that this is dripping with 80s bliss. Lucas Arts pulled out all the stops to give this soundtrack every ounce of umph the NES could muster. It evokes everything great about suburban horror. From The Burbs, and Goonies, to Night of The Creeps and the Rocky Horror Picture Show, the 80s were a good time for fun sci-fi influenced horror adventure comedy and this is one of the great examples of that asthetic, both for it's goofy in-game antics that would set the standard along with the Monkey Island games for that long lost golden era of Lucas Arts, but also for its soundtrack, which fully realized and embraced its every jock, geek, hairmetal rocker and leather jacket wearing hero.

I think I'll stop there for now, let people take in the video links and crank these out gradually. For some of these entries I don't have much to say, but others I have quite a bit. In total I think this will be a five or six part series depending on how much I choose to add to what I've already written.

Upcoming Stuff (Hopefully)

2010-01-02T01:12:00.004-05:00

Job hunting and holiday festivities have made this blog's already low priority for me even lower of late, but I do hope to write more in the near future. Like many film geeks, yes, I am putting together a top five/ten/twenty films list of some sort. I'm hoping to do a variation on a top ten horror movies of the decade, but several problems have arisen that have delayed it. Most pressing of which is that there are at least six films from this decade that I as of yet have not gotten around to seeing and feel I should at least consider before releasing a list. These films being Antichrist, Thirst, They Came Back, Paranormal Activity, The Collector and Martyrs (which in particular I'm not looking forward to). Love them or hate them, each has made enough of a stir that I can't help but look them over. Beyond these I've been grappling with exactly what I mean by top-ten (or twenty as it may prove to be) and even by 'horror'. I'll expound on these dilemmas more as I approach them.

Beyond that I have a few preponderances about internet and film culture in a similar vein to my recent writings as well as a few thoughts about local cultural happenings. This blog will continue to be slow and ragged in its output. I just finished a rough draft of my second play and am showing the first to friends. Theater and job hunting are simply where my time are right now. And I'll confess the box sets of Bergman and Val Lewton films are not helping one bit either.

Happy New Year!

Snow to ICE on 29 through Charlottesville.

2009-12-21T22:43:00.004-05:00

Oh, the joys of being a grounds keeper!

I've been out in this mess a lot lately, trying to clear sidewalks at my job, and have had one nasty fall that banged up my knee a bit, one that left my ankle a little sore, and a couple near misses that will probably leave me sore in all kinds of special places in the morning. Black ice, oh, how I hate you so hard. Like many on my way home this evening, I heard the news about it getting below twenty degrees tonight and how all the roads will be black ice city thanks to today's seemingly merciful sun, but I also saw something else.

As a grounds keeper, there are at least four basic things I need to do after a major storm like this one. The first obviously is clear the sidewalks (we get someone else with a plow, or in this case a bulldozer, to handle the parking lots), the second is salt for ice so people don't slip (breaking up any thick sections with a shovel or hammer as necessary), then there is the less obvious clearing of the AC units so they don't burn out, but the forth major thing I do, which is clear the storm drains of snow, is what I noticed had not been done along 29 through Charlottesville. As a result, the packed in snow has prevented the melt water created today from draining off the streets, and in the low dips it has begun to pool, in some areas as much as 8 inches deep by my estimation. With the low temperatures expected tonight, this is not good. If these pools freeze over, they will make quite substantially nasty ice for people driving into the dips. Furthermore, where black ice is normally a very thin layer of ice on the road which is difficult to see due to its transparency, I suspect there will be some literal black ice tomorrow. The melt water in some areas was so dirty it was literally black, and in one case, a pool blended in with the asphalt so well I didn't realize it was water until the car before us turned into it and caused a splash. This stuff is going to be really, really nasty tomorrow if not already tonight.

Be careful folks!

Brief thoughts on the Cavalier Daily sexism uproar

2009-11-20T23:41:00.002-05:00

You know, after writing over 4000 words in debates with Dan for asserting very similar positions, I'm not sure I have the energy to break down how much is wrong with Abby Coster's "Gender Bender" piece for the Cavalier Daily. Members of FIFE are doing a pretty good job and providing links to other solid responses. It would be a great excuse to compile and revise my argument points from the aforementioned Life Scans Darkly debates into a neat comprehensible essay, but for now I think I'm going to pass. I've got gutters to oversee replacing, jobs to hunt for and a play to finish writing.

So, for now I will simply take a cue from Libby Engel. As a heterosexual male feminist, a recent UVA alumni who majored in English and has lived in Charlottesville his whole life, wore khakis, black shirt jackets and a brown fedora on campus (while listening to Imogen Heap, NIN, Tool, The Decemberists, The Rolling Stones, Tom Waits, Charles Mingus and The National on my i-Pod), used Old Spice deodorant, drank either iced coffee black or frozen mint-mochas from Green Berries, hung out in the libraries (which had plenty of women occupying them), kept a Salvador Dali painting on my wall, sucked at math, probably couldn't direct you to the Commerce School, never went to a single game while attending... other than once to women's basketball, and was never, ever, ever anyone's "bro" (preferring to be friends with people that would not refer to me as their "bro" instead), I call bullshit. Bull-shit. B-u-l-l-s-h-i-t. Bullshit.

(And yes, despite my frequent neglect of spelling and grammar in the blogsphere, I really am an English major... and graduated with distinction to boot!)

On the "Problem" of Reflective Rasism in Transformers 2

2009-11-15T15:37:00.004-05:00

I finally saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and yes, I feel that drinking a weekend-long gap in my memory would have been less damaging to my brain. It was... painful. But I'm not really interested in wasting another moment of my life to bother actually attempting to review why it was terrible. I share my pain only because I went into it with some vague understanding that there was controversy over the film being racist, and I for one whole heartedly agree. At the same time, I do not fail to recognize an apparent contradiction in my hold such a position.

While it was really just one of the first things that came up when I googled for it, I think this article from washingtonexaminer.com showcases the problem pretty directly.

LOS ANGELES – Harmless comic characters or racist robots? The buzz over the summer blockbuster "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" only grew Wednesday as some said two jive-talking Chevy characters were racial caricatures. Skids and Mudflap, twin robots disguised as compact hatchbacks, constantly brawl and bicker in rap-inspired street slang. They're forced to acknowledge that they can't read. One has a gold tooth.

As good guys, they fight alongside the Autobots and are intended to provide comic relief. But their traits raise the specter of stereotypes most notably seen when Jar Jar Binks, the clumsy, broken-English speaking alien from "Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace," was criticized as a caricature.

As some may recall from my recent piece on Marge Simpson and sexual objectification that I used an argument posed by Slavoj Zizek that illustrated the problem with calling The Phantom Menace racist. Since it was a small part of a fairly large entry, I will repeat section here:

In Slavoj Zizek's The Fragile Absolute, he analysis the criticisms of the first of the Star Wars Prequel as an example of a third kind of racism, neither direct or reverse, but reflective.
The usual leftist critical point that the multitude of exotic alien (extra-human) species in Star Wars represent, in code, inter-human ethnic differences, reducing them to the level of common racist stereotypes (the evil merchants of the greedy Trade Federation are a clear caricature of the ant-like Chinese merchants), somehow misses the point: these references to ethnic clichés are not a cipher to be penetrated through an arduous theoretical analysis; they are directly alluded to, their identification is, as it were, part of the game. […] What is crucial here is that [the aliens] are not played by real actors, but are pure digital creations – as such, they do not merely refer to the clichés; rather, they are directly presented, staged as nothing but animated clichés. For that reason they are, in some way, ‘flat’, lacking the ‘depth’ of a true personality: the grimaces of their almost infinitely plastic faces give immediate and direct expression to their innermost attitudes and feelings (anger, fear, lust, pride), making them totally transparent (Zizek, pages 4-5 in my copy, page 7 in the linked version).
Humoring the idea that all stereotypes emerge from a kernel of truth, that the actions or characteristics of one or a group of people are then attributed to the whole of their race, the mistake such critics make of Star Wars is in thinking that it is like the minstrel show, where black performers or white performs in blackface act out racist archetypes of black people, directly attributing stereotype to race. Star Wars is not such a minstrel. The staggering irony here is that in these embodiments of racist stereotypes, these pure living manifestations of stereotypes disconnected from human beings, "staged as nothing but animated clichés" become racist only through their re-attribution with human races. Like the famous lewd joke Jack Nicholson tells in Chinatown, it is the politically correct critic of the Star Wars aliens who, like the presumably innocent (of infidelity but also racism) wife of the racist man, ends up shouting, "You're skrewin' just like a Chinaman!" (emphasis mine).

Thus we see the conundrum: are not Mudflap and Skidz, like the Star Wars aliens, merely "staged as nothing but animated clichés" which "become racist only through their re-attribution with human races?"

I believe there error here lies in the misinterpreting of Zizek's point as one which says that animated character, through its very artificiality, is incapable of being a racist depiction. That is not his point nor mine in the article where I used it at all (in mine recall that I focused on the significance of Marge's physique being identified as a cartoon's as opposed to a woman's). It is that the Star Wars aliens, on every level, are not human, they are unhuman in every sense and are thus independent with no reference, no link to humans beyond their mutual technological sophistication and capacity to speak the same language. The robots of Transformers are aliens as well, and as such are separate from humans, yet within the universe of the franchise they are inescapably linked with humans through a discourse of imitation. Unlike the aliens of Star Wars, the aliens of Transformers try to imitate humans in speech, and in one case literal form (the female transformer with the lethal tongue), thus their behavior is a direct reference to humans.

This discourse of imitation in itself does not make the film racist. The film Tropic Thunder has a great example of this in Robert Downy Jr. playing an actor who has his skin darkened to play a black man. Like the Autobots, he imitates a race, using only pop-cultural knowledge of how he thinks black people act, only to be contrasted by (ironically) a mainstream rapper turned actor (played by Brandon T. Jackson) who really is black and constantly collides with him over how inaccurate his depiction of black people is. The depiction is acceptable because unlike in Transformers the imitations isn't validated by a direct human/racial reference.

In Star Wars we see humans of numerous races, yet virtually identical in their speech, intelligence and overall demeanor. Like American news anchors, the racially diverse humans of Star Wars (particularly in the prequels) all perform in a universally flat manner with very little distinction between them. They are nothing like the aliens and to compare them is ludicrous. With perhaps the exception of Mace Windu and Samuel L. Jackson's 'pimp-saber' there is never a sense that a character must 'act black' or 'act Asian' or any other race based upon the actor playing them.

In Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, however, we can see much more racially distinct characters. While predominantly white characters push the film forward and save the day, I really only recall two black characters with lines. The most prominent is Tyrese Gibson's character Epps, which appears only in periphery, offering no drive to the story but to punctuate scenes with lines that would embarrass a schlocky Will Smith impersonator. He dosen't really speak so much as say, "Aw hell no!" a lot, and after a while feels like the 'token black character'. Near the end of the film, he does directly cause one thing to happen, he fails to properly throw a smoke flair for the F-16s to target causing the planes to open fire on friendlies. That's right, a decorated solider can't throw a flair. Nice job! As for the only other black character that I recall, it is the infamous "bucktoothed black guy" that the article above mentions, who happens to be working in a greasy spoon, and is told by his white boss to keep at it or else he'll never get his teeth fixed. robots. His teeth are cartoonishly fake providing a direct visual link between race and characterization. The bucktooth big-eared face of the robot twins finds a direct reference to a black man, and only a black man. Mudflap and Skidz's appearance, their manner of speech, and their incompetence are all validated by black characters within the film.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is the stuff of a contemporary minstrel, with characterizations direct stereotypes black people and cannot be excused because of those characters artificiality anymore than blackface can be excused for its obvious exaggeration; the film would be racist without the illiterate robots, but with them it is horrendous.

NuvaRing ad against safe sex?

2009-11-11T00:04:00.003-05:00

You know, I was kinda looking forward to a break from writing anything about sex. I mean, various issues of feminism fascinate me a lot and in general I find them fun to analyze, but I'm not really aiming to turn my blog into the next Dr. Ruth explains it all.

But alas, feeling a bit restless tonight, I decided to kill an hour or so on Hulu, and I ran into this ad which I can't help but comment on.

That the ad has a group of women telling stories about how inconvenient taking birth control pills are isn't that troubling to me. It's not that they are shooting down one kind of hormone treatment to promote another, but rather something that is said around the middle of the ad. A woman tells about losing a pill and her doctor suggesting she just use condoms until everything is back on cycle. This, was apparently a huge no-no for the woman. "That's the whole point of it," she exclaims, that the pill allows you to not need condoms.

So here's my gripe: birth control hormones, be they by pill or ring, do not protect against STDs! Yes, we can speculate that the woman is in a monogamous relationship, married possibly even, and simply taking the pill to avoid having children, in which case the "whole point" bit might seem benign. However, we're given no personal information about the woman to confirm that. All that is clear is that there is something unfavorable about condoms, which happen to be the best way to prevent the spread of STDs short of abstinence. The pill and the ring both carry out virtually all the same functions and thus their quality can be compared. Condoms, however, do not function in all the same ways as these hormone-based contraceptives. Comparing the quality of their shared function without acknowledging the simultaneous alternative use of the condom, at best, ignores this alternate use--and its importance--and, at worse, implies their superiority over the condom at its alternate function, which of course is completely false (the latter is admittedly a stretch, considering they do note in the end of the ad that NuvaRing does not protect against STDs).

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with NuvaRing as a product, but good grief does this strike me as irresponsible advertising. It's not like the women are a bunch of teenagers talking about how they can sleep around with lots of guys and not worry about getting pregnant, but nonetheless the ad's disregard for the seriousness of sexually transmitted diseases warrants someone getting slapped upside their head.

Feminism and Gender Debate (continued from FIFE).

2009-11-10T13:04:00.003-05:00

So yeah, I've been debating a lot on topics of feminism with Dan of Life Scans Darkly (good music taste by the way). Both on this blog and over at Feminism is for Everyone. In the case of the latter, things have gotten a little off topic from what the original post was about. Our discussion began when he responded to an aspect of a question I asked another commenter, Lindsey, about part of what she had said about the topic of the post. From there, our discussion took over the thread and Dan has asked me if we could take it to email. Since the debate began public, however, I kinda feel it should remain so if there is anything more to be said (at this point I do feel rather done with it on my end). My blog gets pretty low traffic from what I can tell, so I don't think there is any kind of home advantage to speak of. Still, I hope fellow readers will stay cordial or at least civil.

To avoid unfairly slanting the discussion in my summery, anyone that is curious about this post please follow the link to the FIFE discussion board to see what this is all about. The topic does pertain to sexual ethics, so none of this is probably appropriate for minors (when has my blog ever been?).

As for the debate...

Dan, you asked last time if I could repeat my last comment for you to respond to here it is (if not clear to others, quotation marks indicate things Dan said that I'm responding to; these quotes are all from one comment posted by him and should not be read as a back and forth chat--see original post):

"Just as feminism was a result of femininity, femininity was a result of women. Logically - if there were no women, there would be no such thing as femininity."

That's... just...

Ok look, you just arbitrarily picked a sex to blame gender roles on. You could just as easily say 'feminism is a result of masculinity (and yes, PATRIARCHY), and that logically, were there no men there would be no masculinity (or femininity or gender). You offer no grounding for why the woman must be the 'other' of the equation.

"As such, gender no more "traps" women in femininity than a photograph "traps" a landscape in perpetual summer. The photograph is a depiction (result) of the landscape, just as femininity is a depiction (result) of female traits. It's not a trap - it's a portrait."

While I really don't want to drag out Susan Sontag, your photograph analogy is neither that accurate or to your benefit. There is the assumption that in a photograph you do capture something of the truth, but how does one capture?: through the framing and focus. A photo only conveys a moment, of what is in its frame, from the position of the lens--attempting to translate a three-dimensional temporal reality into a stagnant two-dimensional moment. What is outside of the frame, what happened before or after the shot... all excluded. The phenomenon of the event becomes a story, a document through the photo which can never be fully trusted on its own to convey real truth.

Femininity (and masculinity) as photograph is in this sense, at best like a stereotype: a projected assumption of the whole based upon an observation of a portion. So yes, where gender roles are upheld, gender does trap.

"It's one thing to be a non-feminine woman, but to rail against femininity itself is pointless."

I have nothing against femininity. My fiancee is in many respects quite feminine... when she's not kicking ass with a broadsword or pinning a sheep down for her folks to sheer. I have nothing against feminine qualities - both in the sense of western forms and my above description of gender being 'what each sex does'. Behavior is not the problem, its the constraints of gender upon behavior. It's the part where behavior becomes designated and dichotomized by sex.

"As long as women and men exist, so will gender."

As long as women and men exist there will be women and men, gender designations have increasingly become blurry within our society. We are no where near as strict as we were. Women can play sports, men can more and more acceptably be stay at home dads. Men can more acceptably cry. There is a major problem with women being raped in the military, but at the same time there is a lot more acceptance within this generation for them going to war. Forms of behavior have become much more open to both sexes, there is no reason to assume they will not continue to progress.

No Longer A Man's World? Part 2: Marge Simpson and Speculations about the 'New' Sexual Object as Sacrifical Victim

2009-10-24T14:33:00.010-04:00

Note: Sorry for the House of Leaves effect, but out of respect for commentators, additions and significant edits after the fact are in red so that their arguments cannot be swept under the rug as I refine this when shown the need to. Thanks!

Previously on Under The Brown Hat (yeah, I've always wanted to do that), I purposed the question, if the economic dimension of Feminism, the primary goals of the First-Wave, are coming to an end as TIME Magazine suggests, can we say the same awaits on the near horizon
for problems such as the sexual objectification of women?

One somewhat backwards solution to the age old problem has become fairly established already and is partially to be blamed for why we are able to so easily overlook the problem now. Returning to this idea of "true equality" Stengel purposes, we can see one method for dissolving women's objectification has been through a 'thigh for a thigh, boob for a man-boob' reciprocated sexual objectification of the male body. From the stripped to his waist, bloodied and provocatively Christlike first cinematic male-sex symbol, Rudolf Valentino, to the "neurotic erotica" of Gillette's body shaving campaign for men which encourages pubic shaving, men have been and are ever increasingly objectified (Twilight anyone?). There are at least three problems that need to be addressed about this approach:

First, the most frivolous, is that though women have, can, and do objectify men, it can hardly be said that the degree of sexual objectification is equal. On the most basic level this can be shown to be evident by taking the safe mode off Google Images (I should not have to point out that this will result in NSFW material) and comparing the results for typing in "Man" and "Woman."

I did this a second ago and found for men a magazine cover with Robert Downy Jr. in a suit declared "sexiest man alive," some images of mutilated soldiers, some female nude photos taken by Man Ray ironically, and... well... some ordinary photographs of men. Mostly working class people, but little more than that for six pages of searching.

"Woman" bombarded me with at least half a screen full of hardcore pornography. Women on women, women being gang banged... nasty stuff. There was also a picture of a Muslim Woman and at least one picture of Wonder Woman that wasn't excessively erotic. I only made it two screen searches before I got sick of the obvious pattern. "Woman" produces predominantly exploitative images of graphic pornographic scenes that have apparently no artistic erotic dimension beyond being masturbatory fodder. I rest my case.

The second problem is even though there is some male sexual objectification isn't the majority of it skewed in some way to reiterate the original patriarchal gender dynamics? From Valentino to Robert Pattinson, is there not in many of these sex-icons an effeminate dimension to their appeal? In truth, it is only one vein among many different demeanors and body types of objectified male icons, but if we fallow sexual objectification to physical victimization do we not see the subjects emerge in a feminine role? When the bare fact is pointed out that men are also rape victims, is not the overlooked detail that men are usually raped by other men? Though cases of women raping men are recorded, they are seen as freakish and abnormal and are certainly rarer than men raping men. In the ultimate act of male sexual objectification, the victim's fate is to in being raped be made his assailant's 'bitch', thus reaffirming the gendered chauvinistic dynamic of feminine as subordinate even when the victim is male.

Beyond this subversion that leads sexual objectification to be an inherently feminine role regardless of the subject's sex, there is a more obvious reason why sexually objectifying human beings is not resolved by making men equally objectified. The third problem is the ultimate reality that sexually objectifying men on any level just means more people are being sexually objectified. What is ultimately wrong with objectification is the inherent disregard for the individuality of those who are objectified.

From these three problems we can see that sexual objectification is not a feminist issue--in that limited sense of feminism being the realm of 'women's interests'--because more women get sexually objectified than men and the playing field must be quantitatively evened-out, the way that according to TIME Magazine the workforce is becoming, but rather because this fundamental wrong, this cold, violent even, form of solipsism, is gendered at its core. It is this gendering that, as an offshoot, results in the imbalance of female to male sexual objectification, but it must be understood as an offshoot first and foremost, for the major problem is the solipsist disconnect of individuals from other individuals.

With this understanding of how sexual objectification functions and has thus far been erroneously dealt with through generalized sexual objectification, we can re-investigate the Oct. 26th issue of TIME to see if in its predominate optimism there is in fact any clue for how to deal with this unmentionable problem of how society addresses women as sexual objects. And lo and behold, a rather comical solution does in fact appear in one of the most counter-intuitive of places.

On page 17, at the bottom of the list of Verbatim quotes, there can be found one from James Jellinek, the editorial director of Playboy Magazine. The quote pertains to "his decision to feature Marge Simpson on the magazine's November cover" saying that, "She is a stunning example of the cartoon form." The solution here is admittedly perverse, but it is also misleading. For though it might not seem such a radically new concept--even for Playboy (which has featured virtual videogame women before (NSFW)), let alone that animated pornography and pornographic images both have considerably long histories of existence--it is not so much the content as Jellinek's approach to the content that flirts with something radical. To understand this, lets consider a similar contemporary analysis of sexism's sibling of sorts, racism.

In Slavoj Zizek's The Fragile Absolute, he analysis the criticisms of the first of the Star Wars Prequel as an example of a third kind of racism, neither direct or reverse, but reflective.

The usual leftist critical point that the multitude of exotic alien (extra-human) species in Star Wars represent, in code, inter-human ethnic differences, reducing them to the level of common racist stereotypes (the evil merchants of the greedy Trade Federation are a clear caricature of the ant-like Chinese merchants), somehow misses the point: these references to ethnic clichés are not a cipher to be penetrated through an arduous theoretical analysis; they are directly alluded to, their identification is, as it were, part of the game. […] What is crucial here is that [the aliens] are not played by real actors, but are pure digital creations – as such, they do not merely refer to the clichés; rather, they are directly presented, staged as nothing but animated clichés. For that reason they are, in some way, ‘flat’, lacking the ‘depth’ of a true personality: the grimaces of their almost infinitely plastic faces give immediate and direct expression to their innermost attitudes and feelings (anger, fear, lust, pride), making them totally transparent (Zizek, pages 4-5 in my copy, page 7 in the linked version).

Humoring the idea that all stereotypes emerge from a kernel of truth, that the actions or characteristics of one or a group of people are then attributed to the whole of their race, the mistake such critics make of Star Wars is in thinking that it is like the minstrel show, where black performers or white performs in blackface act out racist archetypes of black people, directly attributing stereotype to race. Star Wars is not such a minstrel. The staggering irony here is that in these embodiments of racist stereotypes, these pure living manifestations of stereotypes disconnected from human beings, "staged as nothing but animated clichés" become racist only through their re-attribution with human races. Like the famous lewd joke Jack Nicholson tells in Chinatown, it is the politically correct critic of the Star Wars aliens who, like the presumably innocent (of infidelity but also racism) wife of the racist man, ends up shouting, "You're skrewin' just like a Chinaman!" (emphasis mine).

In saying that, "She is a stunning example of the cartoon form," Jellinek escapes this error. Unlike, say, Barbie, which Mattel is often accused by feminist of prescribing as a representation of the female form, despite the grotesque anatomical impossibilities of the doll's proportions, Jellinek largely does not identify Marge, beyond the gendering "She" as a representation of female form. He acknowledges that by putting her on the cover of Playboy, as the placeholder of sexual objectification, "she" is "staged as nothing but animated clichés." He has in fact, for one issue, if only on the cover and perhaps a few pages within the magazine, and only in the proposal of this obscurely quoted sentence, offered an extraction of the feminine blackface from the minstrel show of female sexual objectification, severing the link between woman and object, by replacing woman-as-object with an object-as-object.

Is not in some respects the potential of this replacement the same as the sacrificial object which Rene Girard explores in Violence and the Sacred and subsequent works?

The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric. Everything else derives from that. If once we take this fundamental approach to sacrifice, choosing the road that violence opens before us, we can see that there is no aspect of human existence foreign to the subject, not even material prosperity. (Violence and the Sacred, page 8).

Girard makes a point in these introductory pages of explaining why ritual sacrifice is such a difficult concept for us to comprehend, as it is utterly absent from contemporary society, explaining that it is fundamentally an aspect of pre-judicial society. It stopped the endless flow of cyclical violence caused by blood feuds where every revenge would beget another until the violence became a thing separate from the initial wronging. However, considering this phenomenon of objects-as-objects, as placeholders for objectification, can we not see sacrifice not still alive, reemerging, the behavior mediated to a new space that is conceptual now not only in the representative function of the victim, but also in the act as a no longer physical event? Is this sexual objectification that severs individuality from representation and physical form, this 'thigh for a thigh, boob for a boob' mentality of sexual objectification not all fundamentally violent, conceptually and ultimately through its most extreme form (rape) literally? If so, the formula for treatment seems identical, as the victims of objectification (women and men in the made-effeminate position of women) are replaced by a sacrificial victim that bares a "physical resemblance" to the real victim.

In a general study of sacrifice there is little reason to differentiate between human and animal victims. When the principal of the substitution is physical resemblance between the vicarious victim and its prototypes, the mere fact that both victims are human beings seems to suffice. Thus it is hardly surprising that in some societies whole categories of human beings are systematically reserved for sacrificial purposes in order to protect other categories (page 10).

From this point of view, we can see the description of the sacrificial victim Girard offers in the first chapter of Violence and the Sacred is not only a dead-ringer for these racially and sexually archetypal objectified cartoons "staged as nothing but animated clichés," they are potentially improvements upon the conventional sacrificial victims because of their intangibility.

If we analyze Jellinek's statement throughly enough, we sooner or later must ponder the question, 'why Marge?' Why is she "a stunning example" compared to others? For one, she is not the most exaggeratively endowed cartoon character; she is not, say, a Barbie or like many of the common conventions of Anime, nor is she the most realistic. She is plainly drawn without texture or depth, yet she is a stunning example for this very reason. She is, like her Star Wars compatriots, "flat," which is important as, unlike them, she does represent a human. Essentially, they are like the early sacrifices, animals, where she is a kind of human sacrifice, but she is not too human. Which is important as Girard points out.

We have remarked that all victims, even animal ones, bear a certain resemblance to the object they replace; otherwise the violent impulse would remain unsatisfied. But this resemblance must not be carried to the extreme of complete assimilation, or it would lead to disastrous confusion. In the case of animal victims the difference is always clear, and no such confusion is possible. Although they do their best to empathize with their cattle, the Nuers never quite manage to mistake a man for a cow--the proof being that they always sacrifice the latter and never the former (page 11).

Marge walks this precarious line, standing as it were safely before the edge of the uncanny valley. She is not too close as to cause "disastrous confusion" and yet she is not too inhuman as to not bear resemblance and cause disconnect.

However, there is another way to interpret this humanoid-as-human versus animal-as-human aspect. Besides the dimension of furries within animation (which has obviously been tip-toed around up to this point), how else can we interpret the relationship between animation and these animal/human roots of sacrifice? When Girard points out that "Although they do their best to empathize with their cattle, the Nuers never quite manage to mistake a man for a cow--the proof being that they always sacrifice the latter and never the former" what contemporary phenominon can we compare this behavior too? One unsettling possibility returns us to the previous question of why Marge, a character that, why sexually active (with her husband) within the TV show, is not the most intuitive choice for a Playboy cover, like, say, an anime character.

Perhaps the real reason why Marge was chosen is modesty. Let us not forget that for all that Playboy is, it isn't Hustler or even harder pornographic fare. In The Huffington Post article linked to above, they note that, "Marge isn't going to bare all [...] as the magazine says there will only be "implied nudity" in the 3-page pictorial."

That they would lean more towards burlesque might seem obvious on one hand; she is as the article puts it "the matriarch of Springfield's first family," but by the same token isn't that also what makes putting her in this sacrificial position of sexual object so desirous? Isn't that the catharsis for the economically and educationally emasculated American male, that according to TIME has statistically lost his world, to indulge in? Acknowledging the practical reality that her creators would probably not allow Marge to "bare all" (although to some existent, I do wonder), perhaps a better understanding of Playboy's modesty is to proximate her character as the 'human', and an alternative like the various popular anime girls as the 'animal'. That is to say, 'although male emasculate voyeurs do their best to empathize with anime girls, they never quite manage to mistake Marge Simpson for an anime girl--the proof being that voyeurs always rape the latter and never the former.' My point here is not really a literal one, in the sense that, yes, I'm sure there is hardcore Simpsons porn in existence (there's always someone into something twisted), but it is almost certainly all fan-made, where violent sex-games like Rapelay, along with apparently a great deal of rape oriented Hentai, are official products. However, the significance between formal products and informal, unauthorized constructs does bare weight for Girard. As he points out,

In attempting to formulate the fundamental principals of sacrifice without a reference to the ritualistic framework in which the sacrifice takes place, we run the risk of appearing simplistic. Such an effort smacks strongly of "psychologizing." Clearly, it would be inexact to compare the sacrificial act to the spontaneous gesture of the man who kicks his dog because he dares not kick his wife or boss (pages 8-9).

If capitalism can be seen as 'the new' religion, then commercial forums such a Playboy and other publisher/producers (from television, to film, to games) to varying degrees are the subsequent spaces of ritual for sexual objectification. They are the authoritative references with their respective sects, Jellinek being a kind of sexual priest anointing Marge "a stunning example" as her head becomes framed in the figurative guillotine of sacrificial sexual objectification (yeah... I'm having fun writing this). But when figurative guillotine becomes literal one, there is simply a higher level of acceptance for seeing these exaggerated, big eyed, anime girls torn to pieces than if the same were done to a more 'human' character like Marge.

Again, am I underestimating the degree to which Marge is a familiar and beloved character, and, am I overlooking the potential for cultural contexts and differences (Rapelay, like most Hentai, being Japanese)? Of course! And to an extent, no. Her familiarity is a part of her human-ness--but either way, that is a diversion from the primary issue at hand, which is the cartoon form. As for cultural differences, consider the largely feminist anime, Perfect Blue, about a young pop singer who turns actress only to be further objectified by the film industry than the music industry (there's a murder mystery bit as well, but it's almost there just to give the film momentum). Satoshi Kon essentially bites the hand that feeds most anime directors by discussing fandom and objectification negatively, but as such, it is through his artistic style that he bares those teeth and definitively rejects hentai by making his protagonist proportionally realistic and her rapist freakishly distorted. As a result what is usually a fetishistic spectacle of glorified misogyny in hentai films becomes here a tragically visceral scene intended to make its audience feel like shit for ever thinking of drooling over a picture of Sailor Moon. Even within the confines of anime we can see this phenomenon of closeness is not as simple as the character's proximity to the uncanny valley.

Like an onion, it seems there are further depths to be peeled and worthwhile to do so. A reasonable argument to emerge in addition to those already brought up against comparing Marge to conventional anime characters is the fact that Marge is not exactly the most human of characters herself in many respects. She may not have unnaturally formed breasts, but her skin is stark yellow, her hair is gravity defying blue (also apparently natural) that puts even the most eccentric 80s pop artists to shame, and she has bug eyes of her own, eyes that protrude more than halfway out of her head! Indeed, Girard makes note that analysts should not allow themselves to be distracted by the differences between animal and human sacrifice, and though this analysis challenges his claim that sacrifice is not a contemporary phenomenon, perhaps disagreements should end there. But what then is the cost?

If we cannot differentiate the types of sacrificial victims, then we must face a new ethical dilemma. Where the major fundamental problem with the 'thigh for a thigh, boob for a boob' approach was that it overlooked the significant wrong of sexually objectifying any human as opposed to just women, we now must ask ourselves if the true 'wrong' is not the pure act of sexual objectification. In this light, Playboy's treatment of Marge is revealed not to be modesty so much as a hesitance, resistance even, to truly crossing that line between the tangible and intangible, between the flesh and blood sacrifice of the celebrity (or celebrity-made) human model and the immaterial one, for beyond even the kind of disregard that the Nuer are described by Girard as having for animals, the cartoon victims "staged as nothing but animated clichés" are utterly inconsequential. If the horror of something like the game Rapelay is that it is a kind of extreme misogynistic minstrel, the relief and consultation is that, "as nothing but animated clichés," to weep for its victims with their cartoonishly huge breasts and high-pitched cutesy voices is not unlike weeping for the masturbatory Kleenex. In this, the utter horror of the sacrifice is understood. There is a reason Girard's sacrifices are blood sacrifices, and not, say, pinata sacrifices. Without that collision of objectification with the human, humanity is not guaranteed to intersect.

From this point I can truly only speculate as to whether the violent extremity of things like Rapelay is a result of too little "physical resemblance," where as Girard explains, "the violent impulse would remain unsatisfied," or rather from the absence of physicality, causing an insatiability, not entirely unlike another Zizekian concept from The Fragile Absolute: "Coke as objet petit a." Focusing primarily on the Jacques-Alain Miller observation that Zizek sites, that, "Coke has the paradoxical property that the more you drink, the thirstier you get, the greater you need to drink more" (page 19 in my copy, 22 in the linked version), we can see how the escalation of animated pornographic violence might be explained, in a sense, by the lack of physical blood in the ever pallet stimulating animated gallons split, poured, or even sprayed in frenzy. Where the prior cause always threatens such an escalation, the latter almost guarantees it without uncertainty. From neither can we confirm an inevitable shift from such extremes being carried out on object-as-object victims to human-as-object victims--to living human beings, but even if the cartoon victims "as nothing but animated clichés" are utterly purged of their minstrel dimension, cut clean like the aliens of Star Wars to the point that even the remnants of gender like "she" and "her" are erased, is this something we can be comfortable with? Is this not, in a sense, the ultimate ethical challenge - not to commit the truly victimless crime on the basis that it is a crime not because of its victim? Are all these negotiations of sexual objectification avoidances of the seemingly too simple solution of not objectifying, or are they because sexual objectification is an inescapable part of who we are which we must simply find a way of not letting get out of hand?

If TIME Magazine is right about one thing, it is that the 'world' of the sexes has changed
drastically in America, in the statistical arena that it reports upon, and also in the unspoken arena I've discussed. I would like to say my speculation of this one quote from Jellinek was really just wild speculation, but as I look at the cultural phenomenons of my generation, I wonder if it really is out of touch with the 'reality' of today. Like many, I am eagerly bouncing in my seat at the mere thought of each little shred of information that comes out about James Cameron's new film Avatar and twice as gleeful upon receiving them, but when I hear talk about Cameron wanting the alien Na'vi to be sexy, I wonder, as a feminist, both within the simple dimension of victims "as nothing but animated clichés" and the expanded context of the film's avatars, that the human characters use to infiltrate the alien species, just what really is the future of sexual objectification?

No Longer A Man's World? Part 1: Thoughts as a Feminist on the Oct. 26th Issue of TIME Magazine

2009-10-24T11:46:00.006-04:00

I was looking at the cover of this last Oct. 26th issue of Time Magazine sitting on the coffee table and couldn’t help but be struck by the title of the cover story: “Special Report: The State of the American Woman” or more particularly it’s description, “A new poll shows why they are more powerful—but less happy.” Looking at the black and white cover image, the woman's eye looking off into a starkly contrasting dark abyss, those words evoke anti-suffrage arguments from the likes of Helen Kendrick Johnson and Lyman Abbot among others who valued the privilege of staying at home and being supported by their husbands, free from "the double curse or work and pain" that their "frailer organization" would halve to bear, and able to still affect social and even governmental change through, as Abbot puts it "womanly influence" over her husband, for, “She is glad to counsel; she is loath to command." It can't possibly be the argument that the magazine is aiming to make: that woman are miserable because they finally got what they wanted and found out that they were better off being taken care of. Nonetheless, it's an effective attention grabber, and even if it does not aim to revitalize a truly anachronistic argument of the woman's place, the issue does pose some curiosities.

Richard Stengel in his To Our Readers section (page 6) is smart to emphasize from the get go that while the issue focuses on how women are “poised to dominate the workforce” the special report “examines their status—and what they still need.” However, what follows in the body of his introduction to the issue is a cautious but nonetheless evident pondering of the possible end of feminism.

In one very real sense, our TIME/Rockefeller Foundation poll shows that women have become dominant in our society. Women will soon constitute a majority of the workforce; they earn 57% of college degrees; they make 75% of buying decisions in the home. At the same time, the poll found that women are not terribly concerned with equality issues, nor are they patting themselves on the back for their pre-eminence—they are simply dealing with the often bewildering changes and uncertainty in our economy as breadwinners, spouses, mothers, and daughters. It’s not the anachronistic battle of the sexes anymore but how we all—women and men—grapple with a new economy and new era. I suppose you could say that’s true equality.

Even as a male feminist myself, I find something inescapably suspicious in a man saying that woman have found "true equality." Furthermore, the message is illustrated with photographs by a male artist, Ralph Gibson (though I concede to the fact that the cover was commissioned by the magazine's female director of photography, Kira Pollack and selected his other photos used throughout the magazine). The image used as the centerpiece to Stengel's introduction is credited as "A portrait titled Francesca, 1972" but has a slightly different name on Gibson's website. When it is called "Woman and Rolls Royce," the subversive pairing of woman and automobile as objects of male desire truly shine through, making Stengel's statement all the more unsettling.

The actual title of the cover article, "What Women Want Now", is also rather loaded with male oriented gender strife. While online, the article features a color photo of a woman, which beyond the plasticity caused by the lighting and her makeup seems relatively symbolically benign, the printed version (page 24) has a full-page filled with Gibson's "MJ in Little Mirror" which shows a woman's hand holding a mirror with the beach and ocean out of focus in the background. Not a terribly inappropriate image, the land and sea have both the potential significance of representing new frontiers and the blurring of gender boundaries while the mirror in relation to them shows the existential quandary both of woman within this distortion of dualities and individual beyond this distortion, the potential of the image's existential weight is diffused in two ways. First, by a closer inspection of the content of the image itself, and secondly how that content collides with the article's title. The mirror does not reflect the woman's eyes, but her nose and mouth, indicating that she is looking more at her superficial appearance then into the depths of her soul, asking herself not who she is, but how does she look. The mirror is small and round, and while not necessarily an actual make-up mirror, is inescapably evocative of such a mirror through its shape. Positioning such an image beside the title "What Women Want Now" drives the interpretation home, securing the 'material girl' evocation with all the self-parody of a trashy supermarket 'women's magazine'.

The actual article by Nancy Gibbs reiterates much of Stengel's points, naturally in further depth. Both confirm that the nightmare ideology of the anti-suffragist suggested by the cover is far from their point. The economic reality is that women make up more of the breadwinners in this country and as a result, more are dealing with the same kinds of burdens men have had to and are being affected directly by the recession in the sense that it is their job which the household depends upon. Also like Stengel, however, there is that sense that this inescapably radical shift in gender dynamics, means equality is something perhaps more fulfilled then it is. Great, more women are working than men, more women are supporting their families, as the primary supporters even, but isn't something missing? Little to nothing has been mentioned thus far about feminism, but if this really is no longer "a man's world" and we are seeing "true equality" then feminism isn't needed anymore, right?

At last there is Maria Shriver's piece, which has no inappropriate images from Gibson, but instead an image of Eunice Kennedy with her brother Jack. The focus on Eunice is strong in the image; she is not over shadowed by her iconic brother, but framed in the center while his face is partially cut off, as if he were an unimportant side furnishing before the true subject of the shot. Complimenting the image is the title "The Unfinished Revolution" and in the body of the page Shriver offers a viewpoint on the special report that dosen't overlook the reality of women today in their "true equality."

While there's much to cheer about these days on the equality front, we still have a long way to go. Women still don't make as much as men do for the same jobs. The U.S. still is the only industrialized nation without a child-care policy. Women are still being punished by a tax code designed when men were the sole breadwinners and women the sole caregivers. Sexual violence against women still is a huge issue. Women still are disproportionately affected by a lack of health-care services. And lesbian couples and older women are among the poorest segments of our society.

What is in essence missing from Stengel and Gibbs' Virginia Slim praise was the second and third waves of feminism. Woman are working! Hurray! But as truly remarkable as the changes that have occurred have been, there is indeed much more to be said and done. Indeed, Shriver dosen't get off the hook all that easily either. The quoted paragraph is her seventh, almost a side acknowledgment on her way to her conclusion, and while it is admirable that she acknowledged the plight of lesbians, feminism has much more on its mind that she covers.

If my analysis has seemed harsh and excessively extensive, it is only that I am interested in through it pointing out the most evident absence to me in these three articles. Take a look at the preoccupations of feminist blogs like our local FIFE (Feminism Is For Everyone), and some of those it links to. What you find are existential/linguistic concerns, sociological concerns, cultural commentary and media analysis. When you look around at how things are commercialized, on how men and women are depicted, is it really equal? How have we dealt with the idea of sexual objectification? As a feminist, I look at this shift in financial power and female elevation and ponder what the male cultural backlash might be, what things will go unsaid and or conveyed subversively. I wonder what things we will say are ok now, because we are truly equal.

Does the issue of Time magazine have any answers to these kinds of questions? Can we foresee in it any future solution to the problems of, to address simply one of the unmentionables, sexual objectification of women?

FIND OUT IN PART 2!!!

(Sorry, I'm tired.)

Thoughts on Female Halloween Costumes

2009-10-23T17:47:00.005-04:00

If my last piece on Halloween costumes could be seen as male centric (particularly the last line, which was admittedly not the most feminist thing I've ever written), I thought this might be an interesting counterpoint to the issue of gore costumes... whore costumes!

I can't help but draw attention to the irony (hypocrisy even) of me opposing 'sexy' costumes. For years I've said that when it comes to censorship, what disturbs me more than any particular restriction is the dynamic between sex and violence, the utter backwardness of western priorities when it comes allowing gore galore to make it into R and even PG-13 movies while the MPAA threatens films like The Cooler and Boys Don't Cry respectively for showing too much pubic hair and a close up of a woman's face while enjoying an orgasm (see the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated for details). In general, I still think that if something needs to be cautioned or censored, violence is something parents should be more concerned about than sex. The nature of sexual content however does make that claim complicated. How is sex depicted in a given film, and what messages does it give? Is a film's depiction of sex, sexist, glorifying negative gender dynamics? Does it simply provide false or misleading information about sex? In these regards, sexual content dosen't necessarily get a free pass over violence, and for now I'm not even touching where the two blur together. However, even with this acknowledgment I must question if the concerns of sexual content fall truly explicitness or more precisely upon the context and specific substance--the happening--of the content. For example, a film showing explicit sex may allow sex to be depicted more realistically as opposed to unrealistically. Though it may be highly counter intuitive, is there not to some degree a higher level of responsibility in the graphic sex scenes of The Dreamers than the modestly show and romantically lit sex scene in The Terminator? The Dreamers has youths having sex with all the explicit biological complexities of virginity (the breaking of the hymen), but it also has skillful acting that conveys the psychological recklessness of the characters who ultimately through the film's climax are revealed to be utterly self-destructive in their decadence. In The Terminator, we may have adults having sex (excusing for the moment that they are still out of wedlock) but with them there are no complexities, nothing visceral and intimate and complex at all. It is simply this magical, idealized, wonderful thing, that looks utterly beautiful, sterile , and fun to do. Even the fact that she becomes a single mother is left as an overwhelmingly ok thing. It is attractive sex with no consequences, and when you think about it, PG-13 films are even worse about this kind of thing.

Returning to the costumes, I like Lindsey am not really opposed in the sense of wanting to deprive anyone of the right to dress like a scantily clad soft-porn star if they choose to, but the issue is rather one of availability. These are the images that costume stores and companies crank out as the female costume option. Your options every year are, cat skank, fairy princess skank, pirate skank (as opposed to say, Anne Bonny) and so on and so skankily forth (via FIFE comments section which I highly recommend!). Now, my reasons for generally defending gore costumes were pretty well explained previously, but taking the predominantly gender divided options into consideration, isn't this a pretty disturbing dynamic? Is this not the worst connotation of my closing line about "the sight of a kid wearing a Freddy glove, with a bucket of candy, saying, 'One, two, Freddy's coming for you...' to the annoyance of his sister" brought to the forefront? Costume companies encourage boys to dress up like phallic weapon wielding slasher characters while girls are to dress up like sexual objects. I.e., boys kill skanky girls is the visual narrative at play. But don't women and girls have gore costumes too? Well, yes, but there aren't many stores selling female killers as much as fetish witch costumes and the like. If anything, girls get to be victims any way you cut it (pardon the pun). At best, they get empowerment framed within male fantasy.

Back in 2002 a horror movie came out called May which I thought had a wonderfully iconic killer in it. A woman who wants to be loved but isn't, so she kills people to make a man who will love her out of their body parts. In appearance, she's like a not dead Sally from A Nightmare Before Christmas, only rather evil with a pair of scissors. Not exactly the most feminist contribution to horror, she was nonetheless effective as a moder Carrie in her own weird way, ad I fully expected to see tones of girls running around in May (the character's name) costumes the fallowing Halloween. Nada. Not a single one did I see. A google image search has thus far found me not only no stores selling May costumes, but not even any homemade May costumes, which is surprising since as a seamstress herself, she should have been a big hit with the Gothy DIY crowd. Most of the other female killers of horror like Jason's Mother tend to be absent from costume companies as well. This isn't entirely surprising considering that there was little iconic about many of them in appearance, having no masks or special weapons that made them stand out, and my previous point being that it is the iconic image and look of Jason, Michael and Freddy that have given them lasting power, but May, like Carrie, had that striking look. Only Sally seems available, and for all her lovableness, she's really not a monster so much as an awkward girl that wants to get away from her parents and live with an angst-ridden guy who ignores her (sorry Lindsey). Sally is not exactly one to make bumps in the night.

Ultimately all I can really say about the issue is MAKE YOUR OWN COSTUMES! That and perhaps flood the internet with images of the ones you make. That way the costume companies that make this crap might catch on to what people really want and make a wider range of options. There really is something creepy about the gender divide in costume types; I say we close it, fill it, blur it.

Thoughts on Halloween Costumes of Horror Icons for Kids

2009-10-22T11:26:00.005-04:00

There is an associate press piece in todays Daily Progress about Halloween costumes being too gory. It's not on their website as far as I can tell, but like most associated press pieces, it can be found elsewhere.

I can't help but feel on some level this is one of those stories that exists because it's almost Halloween and papers have to write something about Halloween. For one, the article feels like it was written 20 years ago. Its outrage that they're are Jason, Freddy, Michael and Leatherface costumes made me laugh a little as I couldn't help but want to add dates to each film it notes the killers are from.

Freddy - A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Jason - Friday the 13th (1980)

Michael - Halloween (1978)

Leatherface - The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Monsters from 25 to 35 years ago are causing issues now? Admittedly all of these characters have or are in the process of being remade for this decade with more gore and less intelligence, but if you look at the Daily Progress version of the article, it comes with an example of an accursed Michael costume. Clean white mask... yep, that's not Rob Zombie's redneck Michael from the remake. These kinds of costumes have been around for decades. I went as Jason and Freddy several times as a kid, once even saving up to buy a prosthetic mask for Freddy's face which I had hand painted all the burns onto, making sure to get the right balance of yellow to show how the wounds were puss'ing with infection (yum!). So, if they want to talk about this like it was a new problem (if it's even a problem at all) they should probably talk about contemporary horror costumes. Have a parent upset about a Jigsaw doll costume, or a Hostel gimp Mask for kids. I couldn't even find a Ghostface costume from the Scream trilogy (which, yes, I went as, but I was probably about 15 or 16 by then). The fact that I couldn't find a kids Repo-man or Jigsaw doll costume negates the fact that horror movies have become much more realistically gory and arguably more sadistic (torture porn isn't as new as some would think, but the slasher icons of the 70s and 80s were never as messed up as the things recent killers have been up to). It's not like they can say the stakes have been drastically raised by having new even more perverse killers become childhood heroes. So again, nothing new under the sun.

Still, lets examine the "gore." If you zoom in on the above picture of Micheal Myers from the Zooster site, you will notice that at least there is a bit of gore on the fake knife. The linked version of the article above also has a picture of an Axe murder that has no gore whatsoever, making the article extra silly. Perhaps the most challenging of these is Leatherface, who, like Norman Bates of Psycho and Buffalo Bill of The Silence of the Lambs, was inspired by Ed Gein. As such the leather of his mask and apron is human skin. Zooster is pretty conservative in their handling of this fairly extreme horror icon, compared to Costume World which even I find a tad tasteless with its extra face and fingers on the apron and the bit in the description saying to "stalk your victims."

Admittedly, none of these characters are exactly role-models for kids. Freddy's back-story is that he was a child murder (and to varying degrees it has been implied and in some sequels expressed that he was pedophile) that was burned alive by vengeful parents, who now haunts their children's dreams, killing them in his sleep. Leatherface, as mentioned before liked to wear people, and is the mentally challenged youngest member of a family of backwoods cannibals. Jason has always been a bit more sympathetic as the deformed child left to drown by careless camp consolers who would rather have sex than carry out their responsibilities. It's hard not to feel for the guy when he sees his mother (who went on a killing spree, thinking he was dead) get decapitated. Then there is Michael, who kills his sister for no clear reason when he was a child, only to grow up into a a force of "pure evil." These characters are vicious perverse killers, and in that respect the degree of gore present with their costumes is almost irrelevant compared to the implied gore of simply who they are. If you dress up as Hitler, you don't need to walk around with a handful of gold teeth for people to get the idea.

However, implied gore does require you get the implication. This is the ultimate irony to be found in the article pointing out that "Costume sizes can run so small that many wearers might be too young to have seen the slasher movies under film industry guidelines." I'm pretty sure I'd never seen Dracula (any version) the first time I went as the Count. I honestly can't recall If I had seen Friday the 13th before the first time I donned a hockey mask. By the early 90s, these characters were so ingrained in pop culture, it didn't matter. They were on The Simpsons, they were told about by friends at campfires. Jason and Freddy had replaced 'The Hook Man' and 'The Boogey Man.' Heck, Michael Myers is The Boogey Man! The reason Freddy is such an immortal character has virtually nothing to do with the movies. People reading this probably have grandparents that know who Freddy and Jason are, and not the kind of cool kind of grandparents that know own box sets of both franchises. The Freddy movies are silly, but it is the idea of Freddy that sticks. He goes after kids in their nightmares, making them real. What can be more scary for a little kid than that? Nightmares are where all the monsters we fear reside, and our only comfort is that we know they aren't real, but then comes Freddy saying, 'Oh yes they are!'

That was the beauty of Halloween for me as a kid really. You got to dress up as boogey men. You got to make them silly and have fun with it. Like WWF Wrestling, we all knew it was fake. We would make our costumes together, save up or beg our parents to get stuff like fake blood and plastic knives, and then we would see each others costumes and marvel at the person who figured out that Elmer's glue makes great fake skin to peel off your arm. It was fun to get grossed out and then see how people pulled off the illusion. That really what it's all about, the old sawing the girl in half trick.

Still, times have changed. I grew up with shows like Movie Magic, with Stan Winston, Tom Savini and Greg Nicotero as heroes, and I wasn't even a subscriber to Fangoria! Perhaps now kids aren't as aware of effects as I was.

It's not so much that I disagree that some of this stuff is a little out of hand as I'm troubled by the kind of argument people like Joel Schwartzberg shape in going after companies like Zooster and Costume World: the simple trend of gory costumes becomes the problem. I agree that targeting kids below the age of 6 is pretty crazy for some of this stuff, but when in his piece for the Huffinington Post he exclaims "Whatever happened to pirates and hobos?" I have to raise an eyebrow.

If there is any real fear that these characters influence kids, that costumes are influential, then are pirates - people who murder, rape, drink a lot, disregard authority and happen to still exist - really be that much better? Should we encourage kids to be bums? A lot of the classic horror icons aren't that much better really, but figures like Dracula have been so ingrained into the iconography of Halloween that we forget that the original Count offers his three wives an infant to tear limb from limb (and they do!) in the novel. Bela Lugosi and Karloff may be the faces we remember, but lets not forget Lugosi was drug addict, and when the kids excitedly run to IMDB and Netflix in hopes of finding afilm with the two titans working together, the first two collaborations of Karloff and Lugosi were The Black Cat (1934) and The Raven (1935), the two films that established the torture horror film genre in America. You know... for kids!

There are plenty of costumes we take for granted, are Micheal and Freddy and Jason, really that dangerous? At this point aren't they really just skeletons, ghosts and vampires. Don't many kids just want to be Freddy because the costume looks cool, and have a little bit of that appeal as something more grown up?

Perhaps I have been unfair to Schwartzberg's argument. Isn't his real concern that kids are getting desensitized to "brutal violence?" In response to that I can say from personal experience that little of that was evident from my growing up. As many horror films as I saw, the sight of real blood never ceased to affect me. When someone was injured and bleeding it was always very upsetting to me because it was real and I understood that. Once when I was eight or so, I visited my grandmother in the hospital and her roommate had lost his legs. It was probably the first time I'd seen a real amputee and it was almost traumatic. The idea that that man would never walk again with his legs, never wiggle his toes or do all the things I take for granted was completely processed and when we were back in the car I cried. Blood and corn syrup are not the same thing. Kids get that.

Ultimately I think it's up to parents to decide what is best for their kids and I'm tempted to take something of a George Carlin mentality here. If your kid is stupid and really can't make those connections between reality and fantasy, don't let them watch horror movies or run around with fake knives or pirate swords... don't let them dress up like ninja assassins or bandits or in vigilante superhero costumes or anything else that you wouldn't want them to want to do for real or grow up to be just like. If Halloween is not your thing for religious reasons, or ethical ones, fine. In all seriousness, I have nothing against parents choosing not to expose their kids to horror. I actually have found myself on several occasions lately being utterly outraged at the theater to find other people in the audience have brought their kids to horror movies like Hostel II and stuff. I do have limits, and taking a five year old to see torture horror is sick and repulsive to me. Even the last Rambo was a bit much in my opinion for really young minors to see. If you can't articulate complex sentences you probably shouldn't be watching something so hard that it makes me wish the R rating was cut in half and made into two ratings (since no-one will just call some things NC-17 no matter how much they clearly are).

Honestly, my fiancee works in a children theater that is going to have a show on Halloween night, and if I go in costume it won't be anything really scary if even ghoulish at all. I'm not inconsiderate. Then again, I'm also a broad shouldered 24-year-old that stands over 6-feet-tall and knows how to do gore; I'm not a six year old going 'boo' in a hockey mask with some red paint on the end of a plastic knife. Let little kids have fun, especially if they have a chance to tricker treat outside. It's fun scaring one another. Kids scream, and then they laugh. I do understand about some of this super young targeting being outlandish. I'm not fond of exploiting kids, and as I've repeatedly noted, I think with the occasional store bought aid, costumes should generally be made not bought pre-assembled. I'm a big fan of making your own costumes, especially when gore is involved as it allows you to connect with that sawing in half aspect, that magician making something not real look real bit. Overall, lets not forget what Halloween is when we complain that it's getting a little macabre. It's a celebration of life through celebrating death. It's about that transitory stage where we learn to joyously put away are boogey men. Life can be brutal and vicious. Kids are growing up in a world where people around them are maimed and mutilated in wars. The very paper I first read this article in had for cover stories a missing student case and a woman confessing to killing and throwing her boyfriend's body down a well. The world is pretty scary, and there are many parental philosophies for how to help kids deal with the real and imaginary things that if we think about too much can leave us overwhelmed with dread. One philosophy we can see in variation from Halloween's roots to The Day of the Dead and elsewhere in the world is to celebrate death. On Halloween we can dress up like the things we fear and decide that we are going to still respect them, but stop dreading them. It's not for everyone, and it's not what motivates everyone that gores up (some just like getting sticky), but it's the reason I smile more often than feel outrage at the sight of a kid wearing a Freddy glove, with a bucket of candy, saying, "One, two, Freddy's coming for you..." to the annoyance of his sister.

Horror Movies That Don't Suck: The Fly (1958)

2009-10-14T13:22:00.003-04:00

Like most people of the last generation or two, when I think of The Fly, I think of the remake directed by David Cronenberg. The melodramatic acting style of the film hasn't aged well, and the fact that Cronenberg was working from someone else's script as opposed to his own is unfortunately evident, but the special effects are amazing and the film stands as one of the few remakes thought to be better than the original. Due to this assumption and having the original summarized for me on several occasions, I've only recently gotten around to seeing the Vincent Price classic. Then this morning I noticed that James over at Cinemassacre decided to take a look at the film, and for the most part agree with his review. The original Fly is a much, much underrated film that is nothing like its black and white sequel (the first one is in color) with its iconic giant fake bug head monster. Instead, it has much more of the romantic tragedy that the Cronenberg sequel is known for (which was one of the major contributions Cronenberg made to Charles Edward Pogue's script). The tired motif of 50s sci-fi, 'beware the dangers of science' is prevalent throughout and one of the major drags of the film, but the chemistry of the characters is wonderful. It's a pretty sincere melodrama, and the wonder of it is in how great a horror movie it is without a tacked on body count. Like the remake, the horror of the film is what someone working alone does to their body. In place of his teleportation machine, one could easily imagine experiments with radioactive material going wrong, slowly deteriorating away. In this case, slowly losing grasp of one's humanity. It's a surprisingly tragic film, with minimal interest in trying to scare and much more of a focus upon having a loved one slowly die a horrible death.

I can't say really if the classic or original is superior, but in many ways that's why a recommend fellow fans of the remake check it out. Again, I suspect many have confused the terrible sequel, which is shot in black and white and also features Vincent Price, for the original which was shot in color. The difference in monster design is rather significant, original isn't anywhere near as absurd and for the time was a pretty decent low budget monster. More importantly, since the monster is tragic as oppose to a dangerous beast, the film dosen't rely so heavily on it being scary, the limited number of sets give the film a nice theatric feel to them further making the effects forgivable. It's always a shame with films like this how difficult it is to go into them fresh, for the idea of experiencing this with out the knowledge that it is about a fly-man is quite fun. The film's a slow burn investigation that shifts into a confession for why the doctor's wife apparently murdered him. I really like the narrative pacing of this one much more than the original which always felt clunky when it came to editing.

If you like classic horror movies like The Wolfman, I highly recommend giving this an open minded shot. It has really been overshadowed for far too long by its fantastic remake.

October 2009 Horror Movie Reccomendations (Ask Away!)

2009-10-04T01:02:00.005-04:00

It's that time of year again. That time when very large smiles grow on the faces of horror movie geeks like myself. It's the month of Halloween and the #1 time of the year to throw a horror movie marathon.

For several years now I've been meaning to put together a massive guide to throwing a horror movie marathon, including foods to eat, fluids to drink and most importantly of all, movies to watch. Back in the early days of Ain't It Cool News I posted one such guide in the talkbacks, but these days sifting through their archives is a nightmare and I have no idea where I saved the document (probably an old computer long since scrapped). Writing a new one from scratch this year is particularly problematic as I've already been in the process of composing a top ten (or twenty... still deciding) horror movies of the decade list. Not wanting to repeat myself, as I've already written several pages of criticism for that, I've come up with another solution.

Just ask.

While I might write a few lengthy posts on selections for this year's Virginia Film Festival, I expect that like the prior month I'm not going to post much. So this page will not likely get buried. So, I'm going to use this post's comments section to converse throughout the month.

Here's how it will work.

Give as much information that might help me suggest a horror movie for you and I'll try to. For example, list three horror movies you LIKE. Or if you are pretty new to horror, list other films you like a lot. Try to keep the info movie centric so I'll be most likely to make connections. Be sure to point out any issues with content such as no sex or nudity, or only films that are PG-13. I'm just as interested in trying to find enjoyable movies for casual viewers as I am for Saw-heads who want to know what Herschell Gordon Lewis film to see first. I haven't seen everything, and there are plenty of gaps (good mummy movies besides the Karloff classic, for example, I'd be useless at trying to help you find) but overall I have a pretty extensive and somewhat academic background reaching back to the 1910s. If you're a big horror geek already I can't promise I won't recommend things you've already seen, but I'll do my best.

All I ask is that snobbery be left off the board. If someone likes Scream 2 and wants to know what else is out there like it, please, no heckling. Fellow geeks, feel free to chime in with recommendations as well, but just remember, this isn't an Ain't it Cool News forum. So be nice guys.

I don't think my blog gets a lot of traffic these days, so I'm not expecting this to be too difficult to manage. If I'm wrong, then... well... I'll figure something out then. But in the mean time I look forward hearing from anyone who needs help trying to find a good horror movie for Halloween.

Excuses, excuses...

2009-09-05T02:05:00.003-04:00

While it's true that I lost half a day to a saddleback caterpillar sting that made my right arm mostly useless, that this occurred shortly after recovering from a stomach virus that snagged me on the mend from the afore mentioned spider bite, and have had some run ins with my good old friend, the chronic pinched nerve in my neck... the last week's silence cannot be excused so much by this crazy barrage of mishaps (seriously, this has got to go down as the oddest summer of injuries, easily one upping that one where I discovered I'm dangerously allergic to bees and started tripping on the medication) nor by my continued hunt for a job or editing my play or anything else like that.

I mean, yes, I'm hunting for a job and I'm working on a forth draft of my play while researching for what might be my next one (set in late 17th century London) depending on which of three ideas take fullest shape first, and those things do take up a bit of my free time, but that's not the real thing that's kept me off the blogs and facebooks and even a little slow on email.

Nope.

I discovered Doctor Who.

And I LOVE IT with the kind of passion that people often form anonymous groups to help you get over.

So yeah.

Sorry.

I'm so sorry.

Edit: Oh yeah, I left out the bit about my allergy to metal deciding to all of a sudden react to the strip of metal on the earpiece of my cell phone. That was a real bitch. But yeah, still all Doctor Who's fault. The Ninth and Tenth Doctor's in particular but sadly not exclusively.

So what has been up?

2009-08-11T11:55:00.002-04:00

Caution: some of this is not for easily queasy. I'm doing perfectly fine now, so no worries.

Early on in the week before last I was bitten by something and it got fairly infected. My doctor diagnosed it as a Brown Recluse bite. I disputed this some but he assured me he had treated several in his career, pulled out books, shown me Recluse spider bites and that was that. The reason I disputed this was that I've always understood that Brown Recluses do not live in this region. What most people confuse Brown Recluses for are actually Hobo Spiders, which do live in this area and are disputed to have similar side effects when they bite you. For those in the dark about what these side effects are, basically horrible tissue damage of the variety where a fists worth of flesh can die off. So, Hobo, Recluse... the point is something bit me and tissue started dying until there was a very nasty hole in my leg about the circumference of a quarter and the depth of four quarters stacked. More precisely this depth was filled with black and green dead tissue which hardened over, preventing healing and getting worse as the larger dark ring around it and the mild inflammation both indicated. The hole came later when said dead tissue come off - or out (deep breaths and in the words of my bio professor, "wiggle your toes"). But that's ok, alternatives were I might have had a bad staph infection or full on MRSA. The idea of a bad spider bite that often does much worse than what it was doing to me sounded better than that. Blood work was done and I came out clean. Swabbing the wound also produced no cultures. So all roads point to bad spider bite. I was medicated. The doctor told me it would take about a month to get all the dead tissue out using wet to dry compresses. Anna spent the weekend with me letting me stay off my leg and feeding me awesome mushroom soup while we watched cooking shows. about 95% of the tissue (i.e., the aforementioned chunk of green-black dead flesh) came off in the shower on the Sunday morning. The rest of the dead has come off since then and it is healing up nicely. It now looks like I just slid hard for home base and found a sharp rock along the way.

Along with that, I was recovering from insomnia--which means I was also trying to quit caffeine, and I had the worst pinched nerve (I have a reoccurring neck problem) that I've had in years, which felt like the equivalent of having four root canals without Novocaine. I was later on busy helping Anna hunt for apartments (mostly this weekend), and while all this was swirling around I also had a temp job at Ivy Publications this last week. I hope they don't think I was a drug addict or anything terrible.

So it was in fact an exceptionally hectic couple of weeks and I'm looking at the unfinished projects for this blog and trying to figure out where I was going with them, which has been the furthest thing from my mind. I'd like to get back to all those things I mentioned I had in progress but they'll probably be later on when they are back on my mind. For now expect more film reviews/commentary when I get around to it.

Also, I got nowhere since I last mentioned it with that play I'm working on. That's still a priority to me, so entries may continue to be slow. However, I'm hoping that since whenever I say I'm going to write something I don't, that by saying I won't write much on this blog I will actually manage to get something done for it. That's the plan anyway.

Yep, still busy.

2009-08-06T21:12:00.001-04:00

The time between my last post and this one has been extra special crazy. I'll get into it more as soon as I can.

Busy

2009-07-27T13:11:00.002-04:00

I honestly have no sense of who does or doesn't read this blog, but if there are people outside of a tight circle of friends (and in many cases even among that circle) who are suspecting that the blog is going back into hibernation as it did for well over a year, I just wanted to reassure you it isn't. Well, at least that's not the plan. I have outlines for four lengthy posts to appear sometime in the future, two of which are in unfinished draft form. Of these, one came very close to being a finished piece... before I lost all the links I was using due to a brief power outage. Fun, fun. Anyway, my point is simply that I do intend to continue the blog.

So what have I been doing instead?

Several things. Some family/life/work stuff, job hunting, and -- perhaps most distracting -- I've been writing a play. I've finished a first draft and am doing rewrites right now, but more on that in the future. I've just been busy, but the blog has not been forgotten. So thanks for reading, and if I find I'm not back here cranking something out soon(ish), I'll at least try to give another update before nearly three weeks pass.

Robo Cheetah.

2009-07-08T16:41:00.000-04:00

I want one.

Horror Movies That Don't Suck: Near Dark

2009-07-08T13:46:00.002-04:00

After an annoying bout with insomnia last night I came across Harry Knowles weekly DVD Picks and Peeks article. Among the selections this week is a new edition of Kathryn Bigelow's 1987 vampire classic, Near Dark, which has some very... um... special box art.

Like Harry, I find this rather hilarious, but I also find it a tad annoying. Near Dark is not Twilight, and while I'm with him on enjoying the prospect of a bunch of cushy Twilighters stumbling across this movie and getting a taste of what a vampire action romance can really be (that is, good), I can't stand how cheapening this box art is, and how discouraging it is to anyone who hates Twilight. This movie is the anti-Twilight. From a glance though, I actually thought it was a straight-to-video remake.

Near Dark is the other 80s vampire movie. People will often cite The Lost Boys as the best vampire movie of the 80s. The Lost Boys of course being the story of a single mom and her kids who move in to their uncle's house (ignoring potential Toys in the Attic joke), the oldest falls for a girl who is caught up in a biker gang who turn out to be vampires, becomes a vampire, doesn't want to kill people, and then has a crazy showdown at the end. Near Dark is about a rancher boy who falls for a girl who is caught up in a biker gang of vampires, becomes a vampire himself, REALLY doesn't want to kill people, and has a big showdown at the end. It is, the other vampire movie of the 80s. (If you haven't gathered by now, I'm not a fan of The Hunger.) However, where The Lost Boys is rather campy, Near Dark is a hard R, seriously badass film with a quarter of the cast of Aliens (Lance Henricksen, Bill Paxton and Jenette Goldstein) making up the vampire gang. It's an outlaw film, with an epic shoot out and one of the most violent bar-fights in film history. Its a hybrid of action and horror that puts the Underworld and Blade films to shame, with the closest film I can think of to compare it to being the original The Hitcher (which I plan to write about more in the future). But to sum it up, it's a Kathryn (Blue Steel, Point Break, Strange Days and recently The Hurt Locker) Bigelow film. What more really needs to be said?

This movie isn't about glistening skin as the golden-eyed hunk (...of hairspray) gazes at the virginal young teen girl, its about a woman letting a guy feed off her blood so he'll survive because, unlike her, he lacks the killer instinct. That's basically the romance here. They do not exactly sparkle when the sun comes up. Oh, and the golden eyes and white skin on that cover... total BS. Not in the movie. It's that blatant an attempt to make this look like Twilight, and frankly, I don't think Twilight has a scene where someone's throat gets ripped open by way of Bill Paxton's boot spurs. Gore isn't everything, and far from all Near Dark has to offer; it's one of if not the best vampire movie of the 80s. The cover art designer(s) should show a little more respect. Sheesh.

Horror Movies That Don't Suck: Rogue

2009-07-07T22:21:00.002-04:00

During the torture horror wave Dimension EXTREME and Lion's Gate had a tendency to buy out a lot of horror movies and utterly shaft them on the distribution. Greg McLean's 2007 follow up to Wolf Creek, the giant killer croc film Rogue, was one such film. As I recall, it went straight to video in the US, and as the used copy sitting on my desk can account, it was given the most misleadingly terrible cover art they could possibly have given it, but more on that in a moment.

The giant killer corc/gator sub-genre is roughly a step above the giant killer snake sub-genre and a step or two below the werewolf picture. Few people wouldn't be hard pressed to come up with more than two titles worth your time of day. There is Cujo director Lewis Teague's 1980 classic, Alligator, and then their is Steve Miner's 1999 return to comedy horror, Lake Placid. For all the Robert Forster glory of Teague's gator-in-the-sewer flick, it hasn't aged well at all. Miner's can almost be considered the American Werewolf in London of giant croc films, and should probably be considered the best, except that unlike Werewolf in London, it never tries to mix real scares along with its humor; it's just a fun crazy film. Beyond these two though, it's mostly just terrible Sci-fi Channel schlock. The same year as Rogue brought us another larger budgeted attempt to make a scary croc film with Primeval, which I think did get a go in the theaters. It's a film that, while not totally terrible, doesn't really satisfy. Partially because the characters have a human element to face along with their croc, something that worked in Anaconda, and even makes sense considering the premise of Primeval (thousands of bodies dumped in the Burundi marshes by a warlord lead to a croc overfeeding and developing a taste for human flesh, which then attacks reporters investigating the mass graves... or something like that) the action element is ultimately a little distracting. Not a terrible film, but one that doesn't induce any kind of real desire to return to it again.

And then there is Rogue.

I. Really. Like. Rogue.

It doesn't water itself down with a subplot about military warlords, it doesn't avoid taking itself seriously with absurd comical moments (though there are laughs to be found now and then). It's just a straight up film about a tour boat taking a wrong turn in the Northern Territory of Australia to investigate a distress flare, getting attack by a 7 meter rogue saltwater crocodile and the survivors fending for themselves on a small patch of land as the tide comes in. It's a simple good old fashion monster movie, but a surprisingly well made one. Surprising not in the sense of McLean's competence (say what you will about Wolf Creek, but it was shot well, the teens were some of the most believable characters of any torture horror film of the period, and it was pretty damn scary) but rather in how he approaches the film. Contrary to what one might expect from the premise, there are no long agonizing scenes of half devoured people bleeding all over the sand, screaming to their loved ones as their guts spill out. In fact, their is really little gore in this film at all. Some deaths actually happen off camera and the gore of what is shown feels more practical than gratuitous. People forget that despite Ebert's rant about its utter cruelty, Wolf Creek was actually quite tame in literal gore compared to the Hostel or Saw films. For all its very gruesome scenes, what made the film the hardest to watch of nearly all the films from the wave was that it made characters you cared for, and pulled no punches with them. It succeeded in giving the (original) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre experience to a modern horror going audience. This time out, McLean isn't even going for that. He is simply making a good monster film--a love letter to Jaws even, and while it is unquestionably inferior to that classic, it has something that that film never even showed an interest in having: a stiff shot of reality. Rogue crocodiles are a phenomenon that is real, and as crazy as it is to imagine, McLean's restraint on the gore is also carried over into his monster's size. There was supposedly a crocodile reported in the Northern Territory as big as 7.5 meters. As huge as his beasties is, they do get bigger than it.

(NOTE: spoiler heavy paragraph)

When the film does drift into the realm of disbelief suspending fantasy, it is largely on a symbolic level. The formulaic male weakling from the city (Michael Vartan) does ultimately go toe to toe with the croc, in a cave, to save the female lead (Radha Mitchell), the dragon slayer feel of it is strangely aesthetically pleasing. There isn't really a sense of feminist guilt to be had. The scene is practically saturated in psychoanalytical imagery (something I always welcome in horror films when smartly executed) but Mitchell plays the tour boat captain as a strong woman whose moment of distress doesn't seem to bare any judgment on her femininity. That the two leads do not for all their chemistry become a couple at the end further aids the film in escaping the knight saves the princess formula, leaving instead a pure exploration of male impudence. The protagonist enters an unmodernized world where and combats primal nature, but the heroics that he rises to are not the heroics of a man saving a woman, but of a human being saving another human being. The phallic and yonic symbolism persists not as a literal stand in for sexual organs and their respected sexes, but as the narrativized geography of the psyche.

(End spoilers.)

Like Wolf Creek, McLean, with late cinematographer Will Gibson, use the scenery to great effect within the film. Horror cinema has been in an unfortunate rut when it comes to mise-en-scene with many films simply revising the same basic approach of eclectic decay. It worked in Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs, and was perhaps utilized best in Se7en, where the obsessiveness of John Doe's (Kevin Spacey) apartment was used to contrast the pristine library that serves as pursuing Detective Summerset's (Morgan Freeman) own lair. Horror movies like the new TCM, and Saw and more recently (and most mind bogglingly) the remake of Friday the 13th (oh god, don't get me started on that one) today adopt the aesthetic without offering any intellectual content. McLean doesn't do this so much. With Rogue he continues to use Australia in much the same way that Peter Jackson uses New Zealand, to take us to another world. Much of the Northern Territory, including where a great deal of the film is shot, is tribally owned and normally off limits. It is a real corner of the world where dinosaurs are alive, and the photography revels in all the Heart of Darkness, modernist colonial anxiety of the jungle, the dark water that you can't see the bottom of. This is Jaws territory.

The casting is also quite nice for your basic monster movie. It's a delight see Radha Mitchell, not needing to try and hide her Aussie accent. Most of the rest of the cast is a little stock, from snarky guy turned hero, to nervous breakdown girl, to the all time favorite: arrogant asshole that doesn't stick to the plan and almost (or does) get everyone killed in a moment of utter stupidity guy. (Oh, why does he always have to come along for the ride?) Still, they are largely good stock, interesting enough to watch stock. They each get a moment or two to make them likable on some level. The real surprise though is John Jaratt, the guy who played the serial killer Mick Taylor (or as I like to call him Crocodile Dundee-McF*@k-You-Up-My-God-He's-Evil). His unrecognizable performance as the pudgy widow who is sometimes a jerk and at other times quite likable officially makes me interested in the actor. He really steals the show, offering almost uncharacteristically tender moments to the a genre known for cartoonish dog chompings off camera (not that this film would stoop to such lowbrow humor... really...).

Rogue isn't perfect of course. The line between good old fashion horror and formulaic horror is a tough one to walk. The CGI is... CGI, but the painstaking work taken to capture how crocodiles really behave pays off, creating a monster with a lot of personality that moves realistically enough to overlook its other budgetary limitations. The obligatory moment where someone does something stupid, for all its suspense, is frustrating to watch unfold. And while it can be cop-out to say this, it simply isn't JAWS. Still, people that see that horrible box cover, with its bloody mouth implying hundreds of gallons of blood and guts (there are body parts and parts of bodies... but it's seriously not that bad), and the BS "UNRATED" edition label, are more likely than not going to give it a complete pass in the rental, and that is a shame. This isn't torture horror. This isn't Sci-fi Channel schlock. It's a genuinely decent monster movie that tries to be great, with beautiful cinematography--the last work of an artist who died tragically too soon--and many entertaining moments of acting, horror, and action (I unapologetically love the final showdown). McLean can do more than Wolf Creek, and this film shows that. From the range of his first two major film, horror fans should be greatly anticipating whatever he does next. I know I am.

I.e., it doesn't suck.

After Thought About Micheal Jackson's Death

2009-07-03T19:06:00.003-04:00

You know who I feel really bad for? Macaulay Culkin. I'm dead serious. Child actors have a way of getting skewed up pretty badly, but if there is one kid I think deserved a few heavy narcotics in his system, it was the kid from the Black or White music video.

I was largely persuaded by the "Take Two" or "Rebuttal" video to Martin Bashir's special, Living with Michael Jackson, that it is very possible that Jackson is not a pedophile. Crazy? Oh god yes. Still, that special was fairly convincing that a sound byte free Jackson was much more rational than I'd have ever wagered. Nonetheless, let's say he did molest those children. Let's go so far as to take even the joke seriously and say he molested Culkin as well. If that were true, how utterly horrible for him, not only to be a victim, but to be surrounded in media making fun of the fact that he was raped.

Think about it, what are the two things Culkin is most known for? Home Alone first and foremost, obviously, but how many people can honestly say #2 for them is The Pagemaster, Richie Rich, or even The Good Son? The reality is that for most people he is the butt (pardon the tasteless pun) of a rape joke, that few of us can saw we aren't guilty of laughing at or even making a variation of at one point or another. He's that kid Jackson slept with. No, not the one with cancer! The one from Home Alone!

Keep in mind that when the first allegations of Jackson molesting a child were made, Culkin was 13. Yeah, of I'd get into narcotics too.

Even though he's not really a rape victim in the least likelihood, I can't help but imagine how much it would get to me after awhile. Culkin: the raped kid. And just as he's starting to inch his way back into acting... Jackson dies, and despite how much that rebuttal video showed how distorted the media image of Jackson really was (guilty or not), the media can resist dredging up the molestation charges again.

If Jackson was innocent, then as sad as it is, at least he doesn't have to deal with the blitz anymore. Culkin on the other hand, is a big target for some pot shots, and god that's got to suck.

So, I saw Flowers in the Attic... THE MOVIE

2009-06-30T12:35:00.001-04:00

"EAT THE COOKIE!!!"

That is all.

So... Rees is sponsored by Sprint?

2009-06-28T13:17:00.004-04:00

I've sat on this one for about a day now since I followed the NBC29 link in Waldo's recent post to the campaign website of Brad Rees. At heart, when I discovered Rees' website and this sort of manifesto, I wasn't interested in coming down on it for party reasons. To put it bluntly, I don't think he has a chance; the need to defend Perriello against him is the last thing on my mind. He's just a long shot trying to get his ideas out there, so whatever.

Still, even the above attempt to depoliticize fails, as it implies allegiance to Perriello (Disclosure: his father was my doctor from infancy till only a few years ago, and technically right up till his retirement). More importantly, in stating my doubt for his chance so bluntly, I can be accused of swaying voters. For one reason or another, people tend to not vote for or give their time/money to support lost causes.

Perhaps there is an utter futility to trying to claim politics do not matter here, in the sense that I, as a Democrat (or a crazy independent wolf in Democratic Party clothing), am criticizing the website of a Republican candidate. Nonetheless I insist that my interest is more broad than that. It is the content of his piece that interests me, and while I'd like to think that I'd be just as hard on a Democratic candidate, I'm not really interested in who did what first or how many worse things Republicans think Democrats have done. I'm interested in criticizing the content of Rees' multi-media post "Welcome To A New Kind of Campaign From A New Kind Of Candidate" because I think it is... well... special.

The tiresome 'I hate lawyers' rhetoric and the not very new approach of 'I'm a working Joe like you' (even if he is one) are of little interest to me other than the basic problems of representation that crop up because of them. The aspect that makes this a multi-media post--a video entitled "What if Firefighters Ran the World?"--however, I find fascinating.

Where do I begin?

The video is a neat little piece of blue collar catharsis. A sort of Regan era down with the eggheads mentality permeates it as the firefighters breeze through problem after political problem, unanimously agreeing to fix each--speaking in unison even. Sure, it's funny, but while it seems to praise firefighters, doesn't it also mock them right alongside the bureaucrats they replace? Did the tensions of the last three presidential campaigns not leave us with some degree of heightened awareness of just how complex politics can be? Don't we find the utter naivete of the video repulsive? The representation assumes that the firefighters must purely tackle problems as opposed to issues (problem + solution = done, as opposed to situations where either/or the problem or the solution cannot be unanimously accepted, where there are causes and consequences). Of course, I'm saying the obvious, but nonetheless is this a wise representation of the blue collar worker for a self-proclaimed working Joe politician to evoke right off the bat? Yes, yes, lawyers are teh bad... but they have a fluent knowledge of laws and argumentative/problematic variables, things one should want in a politician. A representation like this makes me question that a candidate opposing them would as well.

Another creepy issue I have with the video is the arguable discrepancy between the title and the content. It says it is about firefighters running the world but it very clearly shows them running America. While we can suppose that a similar scene is occurring in other locations around the world, the logistics of it are difficult to actually imagine. Instead what we have is America (the flag is just barely visible in the top of the frame, and of course there's not exactly much evidence that this is occurring in, say, Russia) as the world. Maybe also not a wise image to associate with running for office.

Then there is the simple intertextuality of firefighters in politics. Over eight years after September 11, I'd like to think that we can dissociate firefighters in general with the heroics of those at the World Trade Center, but when they are placed in such a blatant political context, it's still nigh impossible. Both parties have evoked 9/11 numerous times throughout the decade for political reasons, but Republicans in particular have come under fire for it as a rally cry for Iraq. Bush fell back on it in tight spots so often it was almost like a special kind of TS. So as indirect as it is, again it strikes me as a bad move for a politician to take who is claiming a "New Kind of Campaign." But it gets worse. I've been dancing around one of the most striking things about this video being used in a political campaign:

It's an ad for a cellphone from Sprint.

That's right. It shows firefighters, talking on cellphones, running congress (and the world from congress?), and it's a phone advertisement. So if the issue of exploiting the heroics of firefighters bothers you, here we have them being doubly exploited first by an cellphone company of all things and then by a political candidate. Then there is just the pure issue of having an ad woven into your major introduction to your website and campaign. Is Rees sponsored by Sprint? Did he get permission to use their ad? Are cellphones a big part of his platform? Are firefighters?

There is something appealing about the underdog DIY mentality of utilizing external media to get around the annoying reality that it does take a lot of money to run a campaign, but ultimately is it really a good idea? Most politicians try to avoid addressing their relationships to large corporations helping fund their campaigns. Rees proclaims to be "The guy with no money to speak of" but uses a Sprint Cellphone commercial as a welcome mat.

Regardless of political views, to anyone interested in pursuing politics, I think Rees offers an example for the textbooks of how NOT to run an underdog campaign website.

Sacha, Can't You See Michael Jackson is Burning?: Too-Soon-Ness and Icon Exploitation

2009-06-27T11:40:00.015-04:00

I'm not particularly interested in writing about Michael Jackson's death. My parents called me in a short game of phone hopscotch to let me know about it after my dad heard the news on the radio. My reaction was indifferent, I liked a lot of his material and am old enough to remember when he was still huge, but besides a recent look back at his material after seeing The Nostalgia Critic's episode on Moonwalker, I just don't think of him often enough anymore to really feel anything. I was honestly more upset about Farrah Fawcett dying.

That said, I find myself somewhat fascinated by the media reaction. I suspect that this is less a particular fascination as it is the first incident of this kind I've been aware of post-college (particularly post-media studies courses) and in a moment of semi-leisure where I could actually critically take it in.

There are two incidents that fascinate me. The first is rather typical of a pop-icon's death or really any iconic figure's death. I am of course talking about the immediate need to exploit that death. It becomes the fixation of the media, prioritizing it over almost any piece of news that might actually be relevant to the lives of readers and viewers. As in life, the person continues in death to be a free-for-all commodity to be traded and sold. This relationship between person and image is embedded in their very title as icon, a term which loses the person in the "pictorial representation" of the person when their "form suggests its meaning" and becomes something in itself. Calling someone an icon thus creates a separation of the figure--of their form--from the literal intimate person, who becomes a source of tension and instability (e.g. Jackon's image of being a great humanitarian who loves children being all but utterly obliterated by accusations of child molestation later in life) essentially till their death. At which point, the process of shaping their total life into the particularly lucrative product of narrative becomes virtually stable (the imposed form of narrative onto the total life is completed by a formal and definitive end of the story).

In the case of Michael Jackson we can see the perversion in icon commodity value not through the under reported events of relevant news (well... we could... but who reads anything beyond the front page anyway? ;) ), but through the comparative valuing of another iconic figure's death on the same day: Farrah Fawcett. I think Larry King made this about as apparent as it could be made with his tasteless comment on CNN Live while plugging his show for that evening. Originally planned to focus on Fawcett, he said, "this puts that story into the past" (skip to the 1:50 mark if you can't stand Larry King and just want to get to the point). What is so striking about it is the admission that Michael's death does not mean that Fawcett's focus will have to be dimmed down to accommodate two icons dying, but that it means Fawcett is officially a less valuable commodity. She is yesterday's news. The stock has officially plummeted for Fawcett icon sales in light of the sudden rise of Michael's.

At the same time that the media floods the market with products of the disembodied body, the icon husk of Michael Jackson, there is another phenomenon of restraint which can be witnessed. In the case of Jackson, we can see an example of too-soon-ness in the choice to omit a scene in Sacha Baron Cohen's new Movie Bruno where he gets a-hold of La Toya Jackson's Blackberry and tries to get Michael's number. Ain't it Cool News reporter "Beaks" provides an account of the scene:

Earlier this week, I saw BRUNO (Cohen's follow-up to BORAT directed by Larry Charles), and thought nothing of a scene in which the flamboyant Austrian talk show host interviewed La Toya Jackson while sitting on, um, Mexican furniture. As with most of the bits in BRUNO, it was in spectacularly bad taste. But while Cohen was definitely taking advantage of Ms. Jackson's shocking naiveté, it actually turned out to be one of the least cruel vignettes in the entire movie. And what is cruel about it really has nothing to do with La Toya. In fact, the highlight of the scene - where Bruno commandeers Jackson's Blackberry and attempts to relay her ultra-famous brother's phone number to his assistant (in German) - actually elicits a kinda cute response from the giggly La Toya.

Unless he is grossly downplaying the scene, it appears that it has little to do with Micheal at all beyond the phone number, in which case the too-soon-ness of the scene would appear to lie not in its making fun of a figure whose recent death places them in high sympathy which as a result would hurt the Bruno's sales, but the more subtle case of simply addressing Micheal after the fact.

How do we reconcile these two acts? How is it acceptable to flood media with icon commodity and yet in poor taste to address the deceased?

A consistency does occur upon closer examination. The commoditizing media produce essentially two kinds of products: "Jackson is dead" and "Remember Jackson" (this second one of course branches into multiple subcategories from nostalgia to narration to reexamination of past narrative, among others quite possibly). What is apparently so inappropriate despite the chronology of the film to Jackson's death, is the illusion that Jackson is not dead in the present. Bruno is something new, and will be seen as something new, but it is a world of the past which exists unaware that it is a product comprised of the past. This tends to happen with any contemporary fiction (acknowledging of course the problems with calling Bruno fiction in the conventional sense) that is not date specific, a sort of space-time split where the fictionalized present is either an alternate universe or simply in the close future. As such, Bruno becomes out of joint with the current, like the long unseen friend who upon bumping into you in town asks about some mutual acquaintance unaware that they're deceased.

What is likely to become (if it hasn't yet) the classic example of this phenomenon is the digital removal of the twin towers from Sam Raimi's Spider-man. While the media was generally called on for its exploitation of the incident, it was essentially accepted that images of the towers being hit and collapsing could be shown over and over (and over) again, but the idea of showing the towers in some of the last films that captured them before the attacks as if they still existed was somehow too upsetting. It recalls to me the Freudian story of the father who dreams of his son burning so that he will not wake to the horror of him actually being dead and burning as it was reinterpreted by Lacan and introduced to me through Zizek:

Why do we dream? Freud’s answer is deceptively simple: the ultimate function of the dream is to enable the dreamer to stay asleep. This is usually interpreted as bearing on the kinds of dream we have when some external disturbance – noise, for example – threatens to wake us. In such a situation, the sleeper immediately begins to imagine a situation which incorporates this external stimulus and thereby is able to continue sleeping for a while longer; when the external stimulus becomes too strong, he finally wakes up. Are things really so straightforward? In another famous example from The Interpretation of Dreams, an exhausted father, whose young son has just died, falls asleep and dreams that the child is standing by his bed in flames, whispering the horrifying reproach: ‘Father, can’t you see I’m burning?’ Soon afterwards, the father wakes to discover that a fallen candle has set fire to his dead son’s shroud. He had smelled the smoke while asleep, and incorporated the image of his burning son into his dream to prolong his sleep. Had the father woken up because the external stimulus became too strong to be contained within the dream-scenario? Or was it the obverse, that the father constructed the dream in order to prolong his sleep, but what he encountered in the dream was much more unbearable even than external reality, so that he woke up to escape into that reality.

To understand this theory that the dream of the boy is more terrifying than the actual death of the boy, we must note from the set up that the boy is already dead. The horror of the dream is the confrontation with the desire for the son, The World Trade Center, and now Michael Jackson (the element of the absurd in this statement does not escape me) to live. It is traumatic in that our desire cannot be fulfilled. Our dreams show us what we want but can never ever truly have. With are own anxieties of death, is the unbearable reality not the fear of non-existence but rather the horror that we don't want to cease existing but will anyway? That our underlying nature is in an inherent conflict with the real, which as a result reveals a fundamental riff in our sense, or rather our illusion, of control?

The films show us things that are no more and act as if they still are, and like the long unseen friend, we tell the screen that they aren't, but we wish they were. Of course, I doubt Sacha or Raimi were really thinking about this when either made their call, but does it not explain this inconsistency? How exploitation is met with cynical but nonetheless complacent disgust while the phenomenon of films like Bruno and Spider-man evoke a need for self-censorship? The exploitative supplements our desire for what can't be through the persistence of the disembodied body, the commoditized icon. As Elton John put it, "your candle burned out long ago/ your legend never will."

God Bless France: A Secularist Feminist Critique of Sarkozy's Objection to Burqas

2009-06-22T18:32:00.009-04:00

NOTE: I should in fairness stress that my following of this incident has been limited. I looked at a few other stories online which seemed to be summeries of the Google article, so the analysis is based almost completely on this one account. If you feel the article does not represent the incident or Sarkozy well enough, please feel free to leave alternative accounts in the discussion below with links. I'm headed out of town and had to scramble to finish this before it became too dated. I expect that even with the proof reading I'll want to edit this thing to death when I see it again with fresh eyes two days from now.

There are a few things about French President Sarkozy's reasoning against the wearing of burqas in his country that I find curious. Living in Virginia, where it is illegal for an adult regardless of sex to wear a mask or other substantial face covering in public, I find it surprising that the most pragmatic argument against allowing the wearing of a burqa--that it conceals the wearers identity in public--is apparently not an issue with regard to safety for Sarkozy. Where I cannot walk down the street wearing a full Richard Nixon mask over my head without a police officer being concerned that I'm going to commit a crime (yes, like rob a bank), Sarkozy seems more concerned about someone completely covered from head to toe posing a threat to secularism and feminism.

As a secularist and a feminist (yes men can be feminist too) Sarkozy's angle bothers me.

First of all, there is the simple inconsistency of his secular argument as it's presented by Google News. He seems to want to have it both ways, saying that the Islamic burka (or burqa) is not welcome in secular France but at the same time saying, "The burka is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience." How can it be both not a sign of religion and undermine secularism? While shifting the focus to feminism this quote in effect manages to secularize the burqa which poses even more trouble for his agenda when we look at how it supposedly undermines feminism.

Since Sarkozy has relieved us of our burdensome preconceptions about ignorant Islamic barbarism, let us indulge a bit more and lay down the baggage of western (arguably still white) middle-class/bourgeois feminism. That is to say, let us attempt to look at the Burqa as a completely secularized object devoid of as much preconceived bureaucracy of dynamics as possible. What we are left with is an object that virtually conceals all aspects of appearance, forcing wearers to define their selves in a non-superficial manner. When we are freed from the the notion of the non-consensual wearing of the burqa, the male order forcing women to cover up so that their sexuality does not undermine some patriarchal chauvinist order, we see the woman (or wearer of any sex) is just as freed from the objective gaze. Instead of the physical prejudices which influence our opinions of people (what is beautiful, ugly, sexy, etc.), relationships with and between burqa wearers would seem to develop on the basis of personality, one's intelligence, beliefs, tastes and so on. In this light, is the burqa not potentially the physical preexistence of the condition of early internet socializing?

With image and video an ever increasing aspect of internet society now, it is easy to forget that in the early days there were no or very limited avatars and profile pictures. In your home you were you with all your physical characteristics, but on the internet you were essentially a name, a being of text to be judged by the content of your text. This relationship hasn't utterly vanished. For example, I've never bothered to put a photo of myself up on this blog, so for the visiting reader I am essentially these words. You can't see if I am buttoned down and neatly dressed or unshaven and covered in grass clippings, fat or trim, if I look like an Old Navy model or your cousin who plays Halo 3 all the time, to give but a few of the many possibilities. Without an external relationship, I'm freed of virtually all visual coding by you the reader.

A personal example of this absence of visual codes as a positive is found in the many late nights in college talking with a Muslim friend of mine. Though she did not wear a burqa, she did adhere to many formalities in public which coded her very much as Muslim, which, all things September 11th aside, left a sense of treading eggshells for a ferocious secularist fighting the Marshall-Newman amendment like myself. Yet, this baggage was quickly obliterated within the disembodied space of the internet where she would initiate wonderful conversations with me about, among other things--and of all things--Nietzsche. (This occurred often at three in the morning while we both wrote papers due the next day). While I never disregarded her customs, this idea of Muslim other simply broke down, and I found myself able to talk to her more or less as I would anyone else.

The Burqa seems to function mostly in the same way. Inside one's home, it is not worn (among family); it is something put on to enter the public sphere which makes interaction something outside visual coding. This however is not as effective as the internet for it still retains the cultural dimension of the specific garment, which admittedly can become exceptionally coded, especially in contemporary times. While it prevents me from seeing not only if I am sexually attracted to wearer's physique, it also prevents me from making preconceptions about them based on fashion sense... except that they are Muslim. That detail of course is one betrayed by Sarcozy in claiming the garment to be "not a sign of religion." Secularized, it is a garment that, like the text-based internet, actually encourages intellectuality and personality as the definers of identity and relationship.

Isn't that what most feminist want? To be identified as people and not just sexual objects?

I am not unaware of the enormous problem with what I've argued so far. Sarcozy, or any sensible feminist who wants to strangle me write now, is arguing that women are forced to wear these so men don't have deal with their urges. Feminism is as much a psychological movement as a political one, and in most circles it is the gaze itself that is the issue, not what is being gazed at. My point is simply that the object, the burqa, separated from the context of who decides for who, is not a fundamentally bad thing. It is not genital mutilation or some other extreme form of misogyny at its core, but rather something which one could even conceivably choose to wear as a means of separating their identity from their body. This could even be an act of feminist resistance to the sexual objectification of one's self.

Let us consider how identity is addressed by Sarkozy. Instead of framing it as a necessity that others see one's identity for their benefit (ridding all criminals and law abiding citizens alike of the luxury of visual anonymity), Sarkozy focuses on the woman's need to show her self for the benefit of being seen. "We cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity." Identity here becomes something bestowed by society, projected upon the woman's exposed skin. Identity is thus superficial. I think I just heard Camus roll over in his grave.

What this 'need to be seen' really means is that to have an identity others must see you, and (because of the extreme coverage of the burqa) you can't wear too much clothing while being seen. That strikes me as the opposite of feminism, and even smacks of the same subversive motivations as heterosexual men insisting that women should have the same equal rights to walk around topless. If Sarkozy is seriously concerned about feminism in his country he should (like Obama, who he makes a point of differing with) stress the woman's choice to wear or not wear a burqa and oppose anyone depriving them of the right to choose for their selves. He should even insist that men have the right to wear them as well, destroying the gender connotation.

I swear, as he argues it, even the use of "submissive" becomes suspect. Don't people have the right to wear submissively coded clothes? I get that he's probably as hard on nuns for the way they dress, but can we expect him to crack down on corset wearing emo-types as well? Should we be bracing for a full-scale shut down of fetish clubs and a mass deportation of gimps from France in the coming months?

Jokes aside, Sarkozy's argument has a perverse undercurrent to his reasons against the burqa that should not be overlooked by our cultural imperialistic progressive urge to cleans everyone of barbarity. I haven't even gotten to what, as a secularist, I find to be perhaps the biggest problem with his statement that, "The burka is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience." More than the inconsistency of the statement we should be asking who is he to say that it isn't a sign of religion? What he is doing is as a president--one of the highest positions of political authority--is imposing a theocratic position on his people. How the hell can he call himself a secularist and do that? Imposing a theocratic view from a political position as an argument for potential legislation is about the greatest undermining of secularism anyone could conceivably commit.

The purpose of a secularist government should be the insistence of pragmatism and utilitarianism as the means for determining laws. Drawing from the premise of theologian Roger Williams that marrying church and state corrupts the church, secularism can be as much a pro-religion institution as opposed, understanding the necessity of the state not to favor one religion or particular interpretation of a religion over others in a multi-faith populace. As I pointed out at the beginning, there is a perfectly good pragmatic reason to object burqas for reasons of safety, but Sarcozy is not quoted addressing it, choosing instead to tell citizens what does and does not represent their faith and that they cannot represent their faith. While the movement to forbid politicians from wearing signs or otherwise outwardly designating themselves as members of a particular faith is not beyond the scope of how secularism can be practiced by a government, the implementing of such restrictions on civilians elevates atheism in the very same problematic way as elevating a given religion. Politicians bare a responsibility to everyone that they represent, which in a secularist state requires some personal sacrifice to ensure one serves equally, but to impose the same on civilians as citizens is pure religious oppression. Sarkozy seems more interested in an atheist state than a secular government for France, which anyone truly serious about secularism should oppose.

So yeah, damn you Sarkozy for making me defend burqas!

People Carrying Guns Discussion

2009-06-18T11:29:00.002-04:00

So this blog hasn't been very philosophical of late in the fashion that is used to be. I've threatened in the past to make it a movie blog and I've enjoyed thus far taking it in a more media studies oriented and personal direction. That said, I've been a bit of a windbag over at Jackson's blog, discussing people that carry guns, so if anyone (who doesn't already frequently read Rule .303) misses my old stuff or is just interested in the issue, check out his post and the subsequent discussion board.

Thoughts on Drag Me To Hell

2009-06-16T18:52:00.003-04:00

I'm not going to go into a great deal of depth because there is a possibility I will have to review this again later in the year (more on that... um... later in the year) and don't want to rehash it all again.

That said, it is problematic but very enjoyable, especially in a movie theater, which feels like the only way one should watch this film. I really did like it a lot and found it a very fun date movie (something I've very rarely been able to say about any horror movies this decade). The lead actress, Alison Lohman, hindered the film at several places where she very visibly didn't seem to know what to do. Raimi has a very distinct style of camp that requires a very specific style of over the top camp (as Edward pointed out in the previous comment board) It was never Téa Leoni bad, but their were flirtations towards that realm. Still the character did manage to walk the line between being someone you care about and someone you can enjoy watching put through the slapstick abuse (and oh yeah, Raimi doesn't go soft. She get's smacked around just about as much as Bruce used to, rest assured). The subplot about how she is trying to turn her back on her southern roots is particularly amusing when her accent creeps through in certain moments of duress. It's an almost Cohen Brothers touch (there was a lot of early collaboration between the three, as well as actor Bruce Cambell). While the problem is a lack of camp in some moments with Lohman, it is ironically quite refreshing to see Justin Long (great porn name, by the way, but it must have been hell working with Kevin Smith because of it) get a goofy but straight dramatic role. I hope more people give him a chance, because he was quite likable in this.

As for the film itself, it is refreshing in its effort not to rely on gore. Instead it goes for grossing out (think of a PG-13 Pink Flamingos) with bile and mucus and slime and other such fun things you wouldn't want in you mouth. In addition to grossness, it's a jump scare film to end all jump scare films, and this is where it gets problematic. Its almost a love letter to jump scares, they are everywhere and the amazing thing is they mostly work even though they are everywhere. It's a strong argument that jump scares seem cheap because people sell cheap jump scares and that they're is a still quality to be found if them if executed by directors with talent. Still they do almost become annoying in their endless onslaught. The secret to many jump scares being the sound scape, this film latterly beats you up in the theater. It's like having a trashcan thrown over your head and being bashed repeatedly with baseball bats. This film is not for people with heart conditions! The opening is in particular a bit forced in its pacing, showing just how aggressive the demon is by making it raise all hell (literally) the moment someone tries to test it. You just want more breathing time, more effort to make the story creepy in itself (like The Orphanage for example, or The Gift to draw on another Raimi film) but then again, this is Evil Dead II territory, it's about having fun with horror, and it does that. It's hard to describe the style of this fun, for it's not like Shaun of the Dead or Fido, but very much a strange mix of John Waters glee for the gross (though not sexual in this case) mixed with the Cohen's cruelty. Another film I've repeatedly thought of for some reason is Death Becomes Her, which it really isn't like at all beyond that sense of being very dark and yet very fun. It's a film to laugh with and jump through and just be silly while watching.

Drag Me To Hell proves that a pg-13 movie can be scary, even if it isn't exactly scary itself. A better actress and less CGI, and this would be unquestionably one of the best horror comedies and even flat out horror movies in many many years. Viewers going in should realize that its high praise and love is as much for what it represents as what it is, and in some ways more the latter. Torture horror and the kind of bleak hardcore horror that the French have been leading in have had their run, but its time for them to go like J-horror before them. I'm not saying gore must end, but I think a lot of people look forward to horror lightening up a little while still being good. Drag Me To Hell is a suggestion of where horror can go in the coming decade for its next phase, and personally, I'm stoked if it happens, but only if people improve on what Raimi has offered instead of offering more feebler fare. Hard R horror was needed in response to Hollywood fodder like The Haunting remake, and I don't want to see a simple relapse back into that crap.

A-

(Huh, I guess that wasn't super brief. Oh well.)

Fear and Loathing at Mount Vernon

2009-06-14T22:00:00.004-04:00

Me and guided tours do not often mix well, or at least have had a less than glowing history. They are the kind of activity I get dragged along to which makes me want to wear Hawaiian shirts and keep a sharp eye out for bats while walking around in a bowlegged fashion. I've been to Mr. Jefferson's house so many times one can't help but call on and compare the steely looks of the nice southern ladies -- their smiles designed to display pearly white teeth capable of taking my nose off with the veraciousness of Danny DeVito playing the Penguin -- when I ask about "the slaves." This was a sport for my teens, but even when I was littler I was quite capable of being a shit on such tours. I can recall one guided tour through the Luray Caverns, where the line was so long through the narrow tunnels that by being somewhere near the middle, I could make up names for rock formations and the people behind me would continue to point them out, not knowing any better since they couldn't hear the real tour guide talking up ahead.

But now it seems of I've become a reasonable mature member of the tourist herd. That or being engaged to a tour guide with a tendency to drive around with broad swords in her car has put me in my place. Whatever the case, I went to Mount Vernon today and behaved myself quite well.

1. At no point in the presence of a tour guide did I...
a) ask where they keep Washington's pimp wagon (because seriously, the guy's presidential carriage was tricked out).
b) I didn't follow said question with a comment about Washington's mad "grill."

(However, when my sister asked what his cause of death was, I did suggest gingivitis.)

2. When discovering the stain glass mural in the main entrance to the grounds which displayed many great moment's from Washington's life (yes, including the damn cherry tree) I did not respond to its suggestion of Catholic Sainthood with any number of possible jokes from the subtle "blessed was Saint Washington" to the full on Reverend Cory Fallswell mode, preaching how all must "give your mon-NAAAY to the holy concession stands, so that YOU can savor the cherry FLAVOR of our presidential savior!"

3. When waiting in the hour plus long line to Washington's house with the couple behind me talking about Demon Seed, I did not offer that maybe the guy's wife didn't like the film because it is all about a robotic house trying to rape a housewife played by Julie Christie and that most wives don't like movies about being raped by houses.

4. I completely ignored the children's wooden guns that were being sold EVERYWHERE. Didn't even touch one.

5. I didn't ask the gift shop people for an Axe.

6. I didn't make any references to thee Jaws Universal Studios ride while on the boat tour.

7. I never brought up the Free Masons. This in itself isn't that shocking since, really, I don't care about Free Masons. I'm pretty indifferent about the whole lot more or less, and I only bring it up because I found the utter lack of masonry involved in the construction of his house hilarious. It looks like it is made from large bricks, but it's actually all wood painted over with a sand based substance to make it look like stone, complete with indentations in the boards to give a brickwork pattern. HGTV was also not addressed.

So yeah, I behaved. Go me.

It's not that I have any real grudge with Washington, or Jefferson for that matter. But I'm not a touristy person. I hate lines. I hate being out in the hot sun. I hate people talking to me in a very robotic fashion, while other people are gathering behind me to hear the same thing again after I proceed on to the next room. Things like this more me to maddness about 85% of the time if not more, so I become a bit evil to stay sane. Yet I've learned to keep it mostly to myself (or at least, hold off to share them on my blog it would seem).

Finally, having been to Washington's house, I can say that the Monticello people really have their act way more together, despite my teasing them for taking things so seriously. Go them for putting up with my asshattery and always having an answer to questions I'm sure they want to kill every annoying hippy/punk kid or Princess Diana grave robbing adult for bringing up for the eighteenth time that afternoon. If anyone is planning a trip to Mount Vernon and sees a long line to the house, SKIP IT. They rush you through, its not a terribly interesting house on the inside, and only one of the four respectable questions that I asked (pertaining mostly to furniture) were the guides able to fully answer. And, you really need to ask questions on the house tour to get a lot out of it, because in a couple of the larger rooms I was able to stick around to hear the compartmentalized guides repeat their rehearsed information and discovered that sometimes really, really cool details about the rooms were not covered when someone asked and only if someone asked (tip: look for and enquirer about the large key on the wall in the glass case). I'm not trying to rag on the place and the people. Everyone was nice, but you really will get more out of the grounds and going to the museum and the other activities offered than waiting all day to walk through the lower levels of his house. If your heart is set on it, then apparently it's a lot better to see the house in December (less people and you get to go to the third floor then). Also, if you've got all day, then yeah, why not? But if you're making a long drive to check it out, I think there is a lot more to be experienced doing everything except going inside.

Sick Day Movie Marrathon

2009-06-09T00:01:00.002-04:00

So I've been sick and useless all day. Actually, I was sick most of yesterday as well. Not feeling like writing or doing anything physical, I laid around with a quart of soup and watched a bunch of movies. Not particularly great films per se, but more sick day films, and not even necessarily perfect selections of sick day films, because I was just streaming things from netflix. Anyway, I figured I'd share my thoughts on what I watched.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad

There is something about a good Ray Harryhausen that is simply perfect for starting a day. Maybe it's the Pirates of Dark Water fan in me, but films like Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts that just capture that magic of Saturday morning cartoons as a kid. Like Most of his Sinbad films, I had missed out on The Golden Voyage and boy was it a treat. Not a really a masterpiece on any level, it's just a fun sword and sandals on the high seas kind of adventure, but like most good Harryhausen films, it feels like something you would imagine as a kid in the best sense and not like most adventure films that only approximate that experience. It just a lot of fun, and made me want to go back and read all of Sinbad's adventures. Sinbad rules.

I should correct one thing though in saying that it isn't a masterpiece on any level. It is without question an essential for stop-motion animation and Harryhausen geeks alike for one simple thing: the Shiva duel. Anyone blown away by the Skeleton duel from Jason and the Argonauts
will be floored when Sinbad and his men take on a statue of the six-armed goddess. There's a cheat here and there where she is basically just using her front upper arms only, but there are at least two parts where she is dueling multiple men with all six that had my jaw on the floor. Keeping track of that many thing... if you are familiar with the process of stop-motion by itself, let alone having the puppets imposed such as to directly interact with real people, than it will simply blow you away.

The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick

Q: What's a good sign that your documentary is bad?

A: When it is on a subject that I'm intensely interested in and I still stop watching it fifteen minutes in.

I'm not even going to use the fact that I'm ill and wanted mindless entertainment as an excuse. This was not well crafted. Editing is the heart of documentary in all its forms. The documentarian has limited control over every element except how the element they have to work with are arranged, what is focused on and what is left on the cutting room floor. In one interview someone goes on and on trying to tell about how funny this one incident at a party with Dick was and keeps laughing the whole time as she tries to tell it, because she thinks its SO incredibly funny, and then when the joke is finally told, through all her laughing, it's rather mundane - all we learn from it is that Dick wouldn't say something funny he said earlier again - one wonders if anything was cut at all. It's just a really bloated moment that goes on past the good part. It begins as a conversation about smoking in Dick's novels, and should have cut to something else after the interviewee quotes what Dick had to say about the matter (that while his characters often smoke and she had never seen him smoke, his novels also often have a lot of sex--which she also probably hasn't SEEN him engage in). But no, it goes on and shows awkwardly past what feels very much like the moment.

Editing bits like the one above were annoying, but as I said before, I'm a Dick fan, so by themselves they wouldn't have made me quit. What really drove me bonkers was the damn animation segments. Either they didn't get the rights or there is apparently a limited amount of footage of Mr. Dick, because of what I watched I'm not sure I saw any. In place of images of the writer, what we get are poorly drawn animations of him that make Dr. Katz look like the work of Miyazaki. The opening credits are the most frustratingly slow process with each title page having to be a sheet of paper that he pulls from a stack, sets in his typewriter and then types. The process takes about ten seconds too long for each one. Opening credits should be a smooth transitional thing, not something laborious for the viewer to sit through. When they finally got to some recordings of Dick's voice and decided to have this terribly drawn cartoon Dick speak them. I said out loud to my computer "fuck it" and moved on. So congratulations Mark Steensland, you made a documentary on one of my all time favorite sci-fi writers, and I didn't last 15 minutes before turning it off (I just checked my netflix account and I only lasted for 14 minutes and 28 seconds).

1984

This is a movie I will blame being sick for my not finishing it. This was sometime later in the afternoon when I was getting tired and the pace of the movie was just too slow to keep me from falling asleep, so I cut it to avoid wasting free streaming time. It really does seem like the kind of movie I would love in the right mindset. It music is largely done by the Eurythmics and is strikingly good (I guess I haven't heard enough non-singles Eurythmics), ambient and surprisingly not dated sounding after all these years. Still, despite the great casting and wonderful dystopia, I found that slouching back in my chair, I couldn't help but expect the film to burst into a Pink Floyd number at anymoment, or for the the protagonist to dream that he is a birdman (yes, I know Brazil came afterwards, but I still was waiting for it). That's the problem with making a film out of Orwell's novel. It's been quoted and expanded upon in some many films since it was published that one can't help but feel something is absent when watching just the original story. So as good as it did seem, I suspect that when I do finish it I will leave the film with a sense that it doesn't quite retroactively hold up to the legacy it's created. Still, looked pretty top notch for what it is.

Men in Black

After that fun, fun downer that I wasn't in the mood for, I felt like watching something goofy, something I hadn't seen in a while and could probably finally laugh at again. Men in Black largely hit the spot. I forgot that Vincent D'Onofrio was Edgar, and enjoyed the character all over for how offbeat he was for him (kinda reminded me of Keaton as Beetlejuice in that you forget that its him). Not much to add other than how much I love bits like the Morgue scene. I always wish MIB had stayed small, eased off the saving the world scale missions. That was the biggest problem with the sequel and in many ways why I expect (and hope) we'll never see a third. I was the Bazooka goofy answer to X-files and before it was even finished with the first film it lost sight of that. Still, lots of fun.

Porky's

Bob Clark made three movies that make everything else he has turned out not matter. Black Christmas, A Christmas Story, and Porky's. Porky's is the birth of the raunchy teen movies, Meatballs was right there with it Porky's was operating on a whole other level. It's like someone took American Graffiti and gave those kids a stack of Playboy with maybe a Hustler or two to boot. It's foul-mouthed, sex-charged and full of sex and nudity. Seventeen years before American Pie, it still feels edgier. It has more nudity than most modern sex comedies, but there is something more to it than that which is why I can hate most of those films but actually love this one. Porky's has character's that feel real, exaggerated, but real. They are mostly interesting people. Even if they repulse you, there is something there that makes you care what happens to them. I never felt that with American Pie and what few of the other films of that generation I saw. The kids felt superficial and picked off of television shows and the plots felt completely contrived. Porky's has basically two major sex gags--a noisy orgasm, and the hole in the wall shower scene that is so symbolically potent (particularly but not exclusively considering Clark's background in slasher films) that it manages to elevate the film's academic value with its lewdest scene in ways molesting a pie will never touch. Sure, there is the giant condom bit, the killer husband gag and the hilarious "Tallywhacker" scene, but as far as visually lewd gags of the type that There's Something About Mary, American Pie and other films would later embrace, it isn't very jam packed.

A major subplot revolves around one of the member's of the gang being racist thanks to his abusive criminal father and the tensions between him and a new member of the gang that is Jewish. When the Jewish kid beats him in a fight, his father beats him up even worse. The character's arch to becoming friends with the Jewish kid isn't exactly ground breaking or unpredictable, but it's not something you are bound to get from modern sex comedies. At best you could probably hope for a character to quit smoking pot.

Porky's is a coming of age adult comedy for college students done right. I wasn't kidding when I said it is American Graffiti meets Playboy (old school Playboy, that is). It has that same kind of charm with its kids, just hornier.

Well, that's my movie-going experience for the day. Please pardon any typos (though feel free to point them out so I can correct them) as I'm still fairly sick and haven't thoroughly spell-checked this as much as I hope to in the future.

Ok... fine. I'll go see Drag Me To Hell in the theater.

2009-05-30T22:22:00.003-04:00

I have been very resistant to the hype around Sam Raimi's "return to horror" Drag Me To Hell. For several reasons this should appear odd. I'm a huge fan of Sam Raimi horror movies, and think that The Gift, his often overlooked previous return to horror is an underrated gem. I love the Evil Dead movies. LOVE THEM. So why not be excited?

I'm not even bitter about Spider Man 3. Ok, sure. I'm bitter about Spider Man 3. I mean, the film sucked. Toby disco... I'd have slapped Raimi on my way out of the theater for that crap. But I really don't hold that against him. That's not what this is about.

The trailer did just about nothing for me. There are glimpses of the kind of old Raimi charm in there, and even a little old school Poltergeist goodness. But on top of those sprinkles is a glaze of big budget gloss--the kind found in bad Wes Craven movies like Scream 2 and the terrible, terrible Cursed. And all that glossy goop, it's covering a plot that from the trailer bares a striking resemblance to a film that was not particularly good. Let's see if this sounds failure to any Stephen King masochists--I mean completests: some yuppie white person does a gypsy wrong. Gypsy goes all "I curse you: _____er" and then they have only a limited amount of time before the curse kills them. There doesn't seem to be anyway to stop the curse... but you can escape it by passing it on (and no, I'm not talking about The Ring).

Hmmm...

Yeah. I nearly forgot Thinner existed as well. And was happy to forget. But sure, Raimi isn't just making a ripoff of that fest pool. His film doesn't have the father from My Big Fat Greek Wedding trying to be evil. It is has original elements... like the ones it stole from The Ring (which is of course a remake of Ringu which was based off a novel that had a lot more to do with hermaphrodites than the dangers of student films apparently... but I haven't read it to be sure, so who knows). But that's not all we can derive that's creative and original from its trailer... there's also a seance/exorcism scene! Because... there aren't already something like six horror movies from this year and the last that didn't have this kind of scene in them. I know, I know: it's a horror stable, and that's fine, but I'm tell'n ya, I'm sick of them! We are officially maxed out on the holding hands at the table stuff. Let's set on this standard for a solid three years or so, ok?

So yeah. As much as I wanted to like this movie, that add's turned me WAY THE HELL OFF.

The hype has been too much. Every corner of online geekdom I've turned to is gushing for this movie. And yeah, I've wanted to gush too. But I just haven't been able to drop my guard on this one.

Well. That has officially changed. The Spoony One has convinced me. Not because he and I tend to agree on everything. In fact, on several occasions we really haven't, but because he's a picky bastard who for better or worse tends to be very believably earnest in speaking his mind. And if he's not going to tear this film a new one, chances are I'm not either.

Drag Me To Hell is officially the movie I'm looking forward to seeing in the theater as soon as possible. I was pretty confident that I could start my top ten horror movies of the 00s list and shelve it till new years. Now, I'm not.

Student Tips: How To Start Organizing Essay Monsters

2009-04-12T18:19:00.006-04:00

Sometimes when writing an essay, things get out of hand. More than once when dealing with a complicated topic where the thesis requires several other factors be addressed to explain the main argument, I find I end up with a monster. The thesis statement is on page 6, I've accidentally written an essay within the essay, and I'm over the page limit. An epic rewrite must be done, but going over and over all the pages of mixed up points seems to take forever and it gets overwhelmingly confusing. It seems like despite all the work that's been done, the only thing to do is start over from scratch.

In part, that's actually not a bad idea.

The best strategy I've found when dealing with this is to take advantage of the graphics interface and not try to do everything in one file. Open up two new blank documents. Copy and paste paragraphs into one of them in the order that they should be and slowly work your way through. While many paragraphs will need more than a simple reorganizing and suturing together, this is a great way to get back on track and not get lost in a wall of ramble. Once you have a structure go back through and interweave parts that had filled up their own paragraphs so that you get the important points in there without getting off track.

Use the other document as a graveyard. I find I lose a lot of time trying not to kill darlings, so if you find some, don't. Put them aside at the ready, and if they find their way back in, great! If not, it doesn't matter, because that means they weren't needed and you're past that part of the essay. If they are little pearls of wisdom, save the document and keep them. Maybe they will find their way into something else in the future.

And the New Freddy is...

2009-04-04T19:11:00.004-04:00

...a man with some experience wearing a hat and talking in a deep graveled voice. I'm having a hard time getting behind a Nightmare on Elm Street remake, but this seems like a pretty smart casting choice to me.

Still, it will never be the same without Rob.

Top 10 Recent Computer/Internet/Printer Annoyances at UVA and Home

2009-04-03T15:28:00.006-04:00

10. The fact that using Firefox at the UVA Music Library
can result in printer errors.

9. That about half of the computer lab
printing stations do not have nearby student ID money deposit machines.

8. That said machines only take bills.

7. That iLike on Facebook keeps telling me people like Leonard Cohen, NIN, The Decemberist, The National, and Wilco are 'Playing NEAR You!!!' when what they mean by near me is the opposite side of the bloody country! It's such an evil sonic cock tease and it puts me in a bitter mood for about an hour after every time I fell for it before I learned not to trust them. Still, when I see the email announcements, I occasionally don't notice from the subject line that it's them.

6. That I can't seem to get Facebook Groups to notify me when people comment on the boards I set up... or basically anything important within groups.

5. The amount of ups on IMDB, even with Firefox. I mean, it's like accidentally following a bad link to a porn site in the late 90s.

4. That little load up, particularly with IMDB and Netflix, where they show the upper menu bar, but things below it are still loading, so when you click on it, there is this pause, then the rest of the screen loads, causing the menu bar to shift about one inch upwards, placing your mouse arrow over some new thing, like an add or a window to some TV section of IMDB (that I couldn't give a rat's ass about), thus making it send you to that even though you clearly clicked on a totally different thing!

3. People coming up and standing right behind me, chatting so loud I can hear them through my iPod, in Clemons when I'm are at a terminal...actually working...most of the time.

2. Facebooks new look, which is making it really hard to navigate and do a lot of the things I was in the middle of when it happened (such as reorganizing privacy levels so that friends and family and school might coexist... something I'm rapidly giving up on).

1. That the new UVA Basketball coach has an almost $2,000,000 salary, yet the Media Studies department has been cut back so much that faculty have to seriously watch how much they print, let alone can't get viewing equipment that works half the time.

Something Like a Day in the Life

2009-03-26T19:44:00.003-04:00

So... what do I do instead of blogging like I used to? The last 24 hours is an interesting example if a little exceptional at parts.

Last night.

After an abnormal amount of blanking out due to stomach trouble, sleep deprivation and the dangerous discovery that Eddie Izzard shows can be viewed on Youtube, I got down to business working on homework. Wrote a couple Emails to Anna about visiting. Than proceeded to contemplate catching up on Antony and Cleopatra or getting an early start on final paper for World film. Then I got a Chris Isaac meets Joy Division-esque melody in my head for a song about Othello, decided to play on the Italy aspect and googled fascist bodies. Listened to Wilco and read the better part of a pretty good essay, by Petra Rau called "The fascist Body Beautiful and the Imperial Crisis in 1930s British Writing" which didn't really have much to do at all with what I was thinking of. Called it a night, went to bed and read Akira Kurosawa's autobiography until three in the morning. Then thought about what aspects of politics to have two characters debate in the novel I'm trying to write, and how to get the main character inside to convey exposition more naturally through conversation than just thinking about it all but then back outside, because he has to start outside so the nice opening line will work. I fell asleep, forgetting any answers I might have come to.

Woke up at 7:50. Got on campus around 9:00-ish. Wrote a long letter to Anna about the experience of reading Kurosawa's life, one of if not the artist that made me fall in-love with higher art film.

Stomping around in the cold.

Went to class. Chatted with friend about presentation. Had someone mistake me for James Naremore (a rather flattering error to a cinephile like myself) due to a my friend telling her other friend that it was my book.

Afternoon: Stomping around in the rain.

Tucked myself away in the piano room of Newcomb, had lunch, and re-read the section on Momism in A Generation of Vipers by Philip Wylie, confirming my interpretation of it before summarizing it in the 2:00PM presentation on Psycho and Touch of Evil I was to do. One thing that stood out to me on this reading was his fears of the evil mothers seemed to be in part a commentary on how society had positioned women to an idle state and that this was where the trouble with momism seemed to be originating. So, in a horribly misogynistic, turned-on-its-heard sort of way, it was actually similar to the argument 19th century feminist thinkers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were arguing for why women should have equal rights.

I then moved on to read a short article by Laura Mulvey on Iranian Cinema for the World cinema class. Fun stuff.

Stomping around in the rain.

Walked over to the music library in old Cabell Hall, I had left one of my note books at home, sot I did some surfing and jotted down a few last minute details for the presentation. Ed Gein, Philip Wylie, few cast members from Touch of Evil. Fun stuff.

Stomping around in the rain.

Got to class, talked with presentation partner. Everything sounds good. Everything looks good. Then it wasn't.

Touch of Evil wasn't in my bag. It was either stolen or left at home.

I was on the bottom floor of New Caball. There was a reserved copy at Clemons. 5mins until class started.

BOLTING THROUGH THE RAIN.

Got to Clemons, got the reserve copy.

BOLTING BACK THROUGH THE RAIN.

Christ I'm out of shape. I've spent most of this damn semester either reading or watching movies for classes, and it's caught up with me. One of the many things I look forward to after graduation: zee gym.

Got back. Presentation partner was on top of things. I did my bits, talking about the context of Norman Bates and his best friend, explaining how people like Philip Wylie responded to the change in dynamics in women's roles in society after WWII and the subsequent Red Scare with his concept of momism, linking anxieties together from both to create an image of mothers as emasculating over controlling monsters that made their boys dependent underdeveloped weaklings. An idea that would be explored in such films as White Heat, The Manchurian Candidate, and even Them!. With this background, I offered an interpretation of Psycho (WARNING: SPOILER) as a film that subverts this model by making the monster of Momism
something that is simply in Norman's head.

(END OF SPOILER)

More presentation stuff ensued.

Dashed off to World Cinema, happy that the reading for it had been so light for a change. The rest of the day was largely uneventful. Finished classes. Had dinner with parents at China King. Bumped into a former Math Teacher and chatted a bit. Got home and IMed Anna, then went to work cleaning room. Dishes, laundry. Looking over homework. Found Touch of Evil under a pile of books on Japanese film on my bed.

And then I wrote this.

I really need to stop getting only four hours sleep. I'm starting to get used to it. Still, pardon my disregard for proofreading prior to posting. (It's not like I was that great at it before!)

The blog will return! (seriously)

2009-03-16T01:16:00.004-04:00

Yeah, I know. I've said that before. I really think I mean it this time though. What it will be is hard to say. I want to write about education, about film now that I have a more rounded education in the field (about 18 credits of pure film study and another 9 in media and independent study), share some revised versions of essays I've written at UVA, talk philosophy, reconstruct random stuff, analyze aspects of media and maybe culture, whine about the novel I've been trying to write forever, tell a joke now and then, maybe post pictures for a change and, well, I don't know! Writing on this blog got me a little bit of attention that got me involved with some really cool stuff in the past. I'm still doing some job hunting, so maybe taking this in one direction or another might help with word of mouth.

As graduation approaches and I look at a year of largely finding out what I want to do with my life, I can't help but feel that I'll have something to say here. So, yeah. In one form or another, I SHALL RETURN!

WBC to protest Laramie Project production at UVA

2008-11-13T09:45:00.003-05:00

From the Facebook group page for the show:

Hello Everyone,

This Friday (14/11) the one and only Westboro Baptist Church is coming to UVA to protest Queer and Allied Activism's production of The Laramie Project. Our show is at the UVA Chapel at 7:30pm and they planned to come at 6:30pm. The Westboro Baptist Church protested the funeral of Matthew Shepard and is notorious for their extreme hateful and bigoted rhetoric about the LGBT community, and many other communities.

Currently we need to mobilise enough people to create a human wall outside the Chapel, at 6:30pm, dressed in a QuAA or black t-shirt to block/ protect the people who are trying to attend the show, and to show solidarity against Westboro.

We are not planning on engaging in any direct action with, or provoke the WBC. Our goal is to present the Laramie Project, and their presence shall not change that. Please notify your respective listservs asking people to show up at 6:30pm on Friday outside the Chapel to form a human wall to show

We need more people so please help spread the word. One of the ways is to RSVP to our Facebook Event and invite your friends to come too. Please forward this email to your respective listservs - your dorm, your friends, your organisations, your classes. Queer & Allied Activism would greatly appreciate your help in combating the WBC's presence on Friday evening and showing the rest of the UVA community that we not tolerate their hatred and bigotry.

If you have any questions, please direct them to me or the President of QuAA, Heather Welborn (hrw3f@virginia.edu).

If you'd like to buy a QuAA shirt (E-QUAA-LITY NOW) for $12, please email me (vennesa@virginia.edu). You may also buy one from our Lawn table today, tomorrow, or at the show. Please look at our Facebook Group/ Event Albums for the shirt design.

Let's show these people that we will not tolerate hatred here at UVA.

I'm deeply torn by my decision not to cancel prior commitments to come and help. I will be out of town Friday, and thus feel somewhat hypocritical in asking others to go help at this potentially volatile confrontation. Still, I can't help but urge people in the area to come and show their support for the production. WBC is beyond mere beliefs of how marriage should be defined. They are beyond gay rights period. What they represent is pure, unapologetic, hate. This is a group that goes to the funerals of aids victims and tell their mourning mothers that their children are going to burn in hell. Perhaps you believe that being gay means you will burn in hell. But I ask you, do you lack the decency not to say that to a morning mother's face?

For anyone that hasn't seen the Laramie Project, it's not just another pro-gay play. It's not Angeles in America. It deals with a senseless murder from many different perspectives. It asks the question, what are the consequences of how we represent out beliefs? Among the different people interviewed is a priest, who has to ask him self if his surmons are to blame. Homosexuality is a sin, but so is murder. And Mathew Shepard was beaten far beyond recognition. This wasn't a simple accidental killing. It was the stuff of modern horror movies, only without latex and the laughs when someone yells cut. To basically ordinary guys known by the community took the life and destroyed the body of another beyond her mother's recognition. Was it something the culture perpetuated? Was it just two kids who were crazy? That's what the play meditates upon. You don't have to be supportive of homosexuality in anyway to get something out of this production. So I urge not only people who are gay or supportive of gay rights to come. I urge every pastor down the street who believes homosexuality is a sin. I urge the people that voted for Bob Marshall's marriage amendment to the state constitution to come. I urge anyone who believes in compassion and decency to join hands in front of the WBC protesters and passively show them that their unrelenting hatred is not welcomed or supported in Virginia and in our personal discourses on homosexuality.

Water Bears Rule!

2008-09-13T15:13:00.003-04:00

Water bears survive in the vacuum of space. Kinda old news, but it's news to me!

Somebody needs to make giant stuffed-animal water bears. Like those huge stuffed dogs they used to sell at Sam's Club. Someday, I want to give a kid a giant stuffed water bear. That would be awesome. Could Pixar please get rolling on A Water Bear's Life, so that the merchandising arm can make my water bear snuggling dreams come true?

Via Ellie Connelly.

So... is the blog dead or what?

2008-08-24T11:56:00.002-04:00

Nope. It's just in a coma.

I seriously considered pulling the plug on it though. But I do enjoy it when I can find the time (which lately I haven't), and I've had the odd experience more and more lately of discovering people actually read it. So, I'm thinking of dusting it off once again when I have time. The soonest I can see that being is after this Fall semester at UVA, but I might sneak some stuff in before then. There will probably be some top ten (in no order) film lists, which I might later discuss each movie from in more detail. It will definitely be more film and film theory oriented, but random ramblings are sure to appear.

Politics, as I've said before, will be significantly reduced if even notably present. I've really enjoyed the political bloggers I've met, discussed and debated with since I found issues like the marriage amendment to write about, and if shift in focus means a full parting with that crowd then I wish them/you all the best. While I was helping take care of my grandmother, I spent a lot of time at home on call, which meant I had a lot more time to do things like look into political issues more thoroughly. With her passing, that situation changed, and I'm finding I have more time and means to return to the things that really make me happy. I doubt this blog will ever be as active as it was for a while, but I'd like to get try and produce an article weekly to biweekly. We'll see how it goes.

Thanks again everyone.

Until winter (if not sooner), cheers!

Happy mother's day.

2008-05-11T12:26:00.001-04:00

Heh... heh... platypus.

It's a Man's World: The Movie?

2008-05-04T16:14:00.003-04:00

So she says.

I've still no time to really comment on the article sadly. Though it is an interesting observation. Almost done with finals!

Twitch... twitch.

(Thanks Leora for the link!)

Happy Easter!

2008-03-23T12:12:00.002-04:00

So what am I doing all day today? Reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus for ENGL-382. Twistedly fitting, I think.

Cheers!

Brief Thoughts on Torture Protests

2008-03-22T13:16:00.002-04:00

I'm a little to swamped right now to engage in any lengthy discussions about interrogation policies and the ethics of America using torture methods. Suffice to say I am against the use of torture. Regardless of feelings towards terrorist or suspects of terrorism, I simply do not adhere to the rationality that if an enemy is probably going to do a wrong either way, we should condone that wrong by doing it ourselves. If we torture our enemies, it sends a message that we are ok with them torturing our troops and civilians when held captive by them. Furthermore, I do not believe torture works, or at least works to a consistently reliable degree. If someone is tortured, they will say anything to stop being tortured, but that doesn't mean what they say will be true. If anything, it's more effective at getting the tortured to say what the torturer wants them to say. Thus, it is a method of investigation that is highly susceptible to corruption.

With my position on torture made clear, I'd like to criticize some of the methods of anti-torture protesters, not to dissuade them from opposing what I agree with them is wrong, but in hopes that better strategies can be devised.

With all due respect to the individuals who did this and their willingness to inflict actual torture upon themselves to show others how wrong it is, these kinds of protests are really, really stupid.

Why? Because though the activist is getting a very real idea of what is being done to prisoners, the audience isn't. What we are seeing is someone hanging upside down flailing about. It looks like an act at best. At worst, it does look real, and only encourages people that it isn't such a big deal that we are doing this to people, since some peace loving hippie is willing to do it to himself. It looks unpleasant but comparably ethical to say... slowly cutting someones fingers off. If there is permanent damage, it is psychological and will not be expressed easily to a skeptical audience. They will simply see that you were willing to do it, and are probably going to be right as rain the next day, so what's the big deal?

What people actively protesting torture seem to forget or overlook is what torture means to the masses right now. Torture horror films have enjoyed more success in the last 4 years than ever before in America. When people have sat through the carnage of Saw, Hostel, their sequels and numerous other blood baths, pouring water up someone's nose seems like a joke. People actually don't believe it is torture and that's where the real battle ground is. If you want to make change, you need to go at the heart of American desensitization and reaffirm the dictionary definition of torture. Otherwise, you're just encouraging what you are against by making it look like less of a big deal than what it is.

5 Favorite Horror(ish) Movies to Watch on Easter

2008-03-22T11:23:00.003-04:00

These aren't really in any order. Little too busy right now to stop and think them over to that degree. Most of these films happened to be playing on TV during Easter when I was little which is why they make the list. This isn't supposed to be some kind of Easter Movie list. Except to the degree that it actually is.

Tarantula (1955)

I will always hold Them as the greatest giant bug movie, but this one comes pretty close. Like Them, Tarantula had a director who understood how to make the idea of a monster scary. Another fine classic from Jack Arnold, best known for Creature from the Black Lagoon. What more could a candy buzzed kid ask for?

Gargoyles (1972)

Creature master Stan Winston's first monster movie. In many ways a great low budget predecessor to Clive Barker's Nightbreed. Though perhaps my memory is a little blurry as to who was good and who was bad in the film. Either way, it's cheesy gold in wrapped in in golden cheese.

The Swarm (1978)

Oh sweet Jesus! (Pardon.) This movie is bad. Bad, bad, BAD. Back when natural disaster movies like Earthquake were all the rage, this was thought to be the next big one. A lot of money was poured into it. Great actors were hired. Terrible crap was made.

I for one, love killer bee movies. It's one of those crazy genres like tornado movies that used to flood television. I remember when everyone was so afraid that African killer bees were going to migrate north and kill everyone. Then winter came about and they chilled out in Texas. (God there are too many crazy things that can kill you in Texas. Its like Australia's little brother only with more guns and less deadly snakes.) What can I say? I was a big bee geek at the time.

As I said, unlike those hilarious Family Channel TV movies, The Swarm was BIG. I'm not sure if we can comprehend the kind of flop this movie was. Oh wait, yes we can: Battlefield: Earth. This movie was the Battlefiel: Earth of the 70s. It is to movie geeks what a good wreck is to people who watch NASCAR.

Critters 2: The Main Course (1988)

Why is it so fun to watch the Easter Bunny die a horrible death by flesh devouring balls of fluff? I don't know. I just admitted to liking The Swarm. Things like this were the reason New Line Cinema was so great in the 80s and 90s. They will be missed.

Last but not least. Hands down favorite horror movie to watch on Easter...

NIGHT

OF

THE LEPUS

That's right, a movie about giant killer bunnies. No words can describe how great this movie is.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes... The Killer Shrews... Orca... Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter... they got NOTHING on Night of the Lepus. Giant killer bunnies is where it's at.

Well, maybe Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.

Happy holidays.

Wandering observations in UVA Book Store.

2008-03-21T18:48:00.005-04:00

Had some time to kill today after class and found myself wandering around in UVA's bookstore. It was interesting to be there without the rushing and crowds, trying to get books for the coming semester. I probably would have noticed other interesting things, but I haven't had coffee in three days and am writing a long paper on torture in cinema. My brain was tuned to the weird. They didn't have a chance.

Observation 1.

They have Black Hole by Charles Burns for $17-something. Sweet! I don't read comics (other than online) but if I did I'd probably be eating stuff like this and Sandman up. Next time I have 18 bucks to burn I might have to get it. David Fincher is going to direct the film version adapted by Gaiman and Arvary, and flipping through a few pages of the comic, I couldn't be happier. I think Fincher is really on a rebound right now (Zodiac may become my favorite thing by him) and this could be his next Fight Club. I just hope he goes all the way with its extremes. It would probably land him an NC-17 rating, but who cares? With the stuff that passes in for R these days and how A-OK it is to do ANYTHING in Unrated (including absolutely nothing) I find it ridiculous for people to still get up at arms about NC-17 rated films about peoples special bits. Hostel: Part 2 showed special bits... being cut off with gardening shears and fed to a hound, but that's okay, cause they were being cut off and fed to hounds. If there is one thing I've learned in the last few years from this fine state I love so very much, it is that people love the penis, just as long as it is not inside a woman. Penis in woman = bad. Penis in anything else... no problem! Wouldn't want the youth of America getting the wrong idea.

Oh wait....

Side note: I should blog about Lust Caution, but not now.

Observation 2.

Geeks should not act elitist or otherwise snobbish while they have runny noses. It's just... no... don't do that. I'm not saying the kid was... I'm just saying.

Observation 3.

The bookstore also has Our Friends from Frolix 8 by Philip K. Dick. Maybe I've just been away from new books too long, but the text for this seems really saturated. No, wait, I have plenty of brand new books. The font for this looks like every thing is bold. Did they use too much ink? Odd.

Observation 4.

Wandering into the clothing section of the book store (doesn't make sense to me either), I came across a strange discovery. UVA sells UVA thong underwear. Now, I'm a mature 22-year-old member of society (Hey! I heard that!) and I understand that thong under is commonly worn by women as a preference and not just to appeal to men for the sexy time. Hear me out. There is just something phenomenally wrong with placing the UVA V and crossed swords on a woman's crotch. It's almost as bad as naming a condom brand TROJANS. Maybe it was just Observation 1 still lingering in my head, but the image just screamed castration by scissor swords. Wah-hoo-wah INDEED!

Afterthought: Teeth 2 should totally be filmed on our campus.

Yet Another reason why I don't like Cvillemovies.com

2008-01-26T11:36:00.000-05:00

I've been screwed over more than once by cvillemovies.com. Wrong showing times... hell, even a wrong location a couple years ago, if I recall right, but now ratings?

Looks like it.

According to the site as of right now, Rambo is rated PG-13. It's rated PG-13 "for strong graphic bloody violence, sexual assaults, grisly images and language."

Thank heavens for that! I was worried that Stallone might say fuck more than once!

Seriously. The film is rated R, and not that cushy Lethal Weapon 4 R. This is Saving Privet Ryan R. This is tear out your throat and spill your entrails with a machete R.

Does this look PG-13 to you?

So yeah, nice going cvillemovies.com. It doesn't effect me any, being neither a parent or underage, but I'm sure its an inconvenience to someone. The ratings system is stupid enough without this.

Actions speak louder than words.

2007-11-22T16:09:00.000-05:00

Status of blog.

End of Week Two at UVA

2007-09-08T15:03:00.000-04:00

Never finished watching If....

Maybe somewhere down the road I'll come back to it and dig it... or hate it. I was just too tired too tell if I was watching arthouse b.s. or a quality experimental film. Perhaps I should of said experimental b.s. and quality arthouse? (There's probably a good blog entry to be made from that question.) The last two week have allowed me to apreciate the joe that just wants to watch something blow up. Yesterday I rented Raiders of the Lost Arc and watched it over a bottle of IPA Ruination. Jackson was right, that stuff is pretty good.

My best advice to anyone looking to transfer to UVA in for their third year is to know EXACTLY what you want to major in. Third years really don't get a chance to explore.

At the time being I really don't think I want to go the linguistics rout. I might keep it as a minor, but I think it would really limit my options of places I could get a job teaching at in the area. Furthermore, I'm not sure I could teach it as well or with the enthusiasim that I could teach liturature or media studies. Ah... media studies.... That's my current battle gournd for a major. Though it isn't a cake walk if you haven't filled out a form by March 15th, which I didn't.

Otherwise things are going pretty nice. The walking is helping me lose the summer's reclusive writer/geek fat. Classes are good. about 200 pages a week to read. I get along with my professors. The cafateria has sushi. Work on weekends. Good times.

Still working on the social life bit though, and to a lesser extent the blogging life. (Sorry, got to prioritize.)

Hmm... Blogger's spellcheck isn't working. I'll have do sometihng about that... maybe later.

Pleasure Reading:
"American Gods" by Neil Gaiman

High Rotation:
I'm ripping a lot of my cds this weekend so I'm shuffling Rolling Stones, Nine Inch Nails and some of this and that.

Homework:
Catching up on my reading for my Slavic Folklore class.
Preparing for Structure of English (linguistics) quizz for next week.

End of week one at UVA.

2007-08-31T23:50:00.000-04:00

I've decided the perfect song to sum up week one for me is "Nobody Told Me" by John Lennon.

I'm going to go watch the film If.... now. Netflix sent it to me since it was next on my queue. I've never heard of it until recently but seeing Malcom McDowell in something else from around the time he did A Clockwork Orange should be interesting.

Oh the heck with it!

2007-08-24T15:50:00.000-04:00

Alright, I'm tired of my personal little no movie geeking rule for this blog. It was well reasoned when I made it for myself, but until I find a band of cinephiles at UVA I feel like a big chunk of my interests has very little outlet.

I've been interested in sometime down the road getting a job as a film critic if the chance arises, so keeping that part of my brain in tune is probably good anyway. If it turns out this blog goes 90% movie posts then so be it. I haven't been in much of a political blogging mood anyway. For someone that hates politics I think I've made a decent effort to stay involved, but more and more I find I'd rather comment on other people's blogs about issues when I have something to say. If the political bug does bite me again (which I fully expect it will), and people weigh my arguments by where I stand on the new Star Wars films or David Lynch as opposed to my actual points, then to hell with 'em. I really don't see that happening though. So at the risk of this blog thematically changing quite a bit, I'm going to write about whatever I feel like when I feel like it. (Though I expect I'll probably be too busy to write much of anything until I get settled into UVA.)

Any objections?

Question for Doom 3 Gamers

2007-08-20T12:47:00.000-04:00

(UPDATE: I changed my mind on computers at the last minute. Alterations have been made below.)

Looks like I'm finally getting around to buying a new computer. The iMac 20-inch with 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo looks like the winner.

What I want to know is, with its ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT, will I be able to play Doom 3 or anything else that has come out in the last four years while I've been off in PS2 land? If not, what chip do I need to pick up down the road if I do want to buy Doom 3 and how much of a pain will it be to get it in my computer?

I'm a casual gamer, so I'm not asking what will make my computer the most 133+ gaming computer out there. I just want to know if I'll need something to make it run smooth and be fun so that I don't come home one day all gitty with a copy of Doom 3, only to sit there after installing it, frustrated when it won't run right if at all. I hate that installed a new kickass game I've wanted to play for a while but now it won't run feeling. HATE IT!

The Joker is at it again!

2007-07-30T20:45:00.000-04:00

As many Batman fans know, The Dark Knight is using viral marketing similar to that used for NIN's Year Zero. I don't have much time right now to go into it all but a few minutes of Googleing should sort things out. For now I thought I'd point out two things new to me that I noticed today.

There is a website called friendsforharveydent.org. Pretty much the same as the normal Harvey Dent ad at the main site, I Believe in Harvey Dent. However, looking at its properties, I see that there is alternate text, "See you in December." Again, nothing new for those that have been following this, other than that it is another page doing the same thing which might mean more to come down the road.

The other big thing is that going back to Why So Serious, which recently leaked the first image of of Heath as The Joker, the first teaser and recently gave instructions for fans to appear at locations dressed in make-up, now has rewarded those fans. Going there now will automatically send you to a new site: Rent-A-Clown. A nice touch, looking at the source code reveals several "HAHAHAHAH..." lines.

All and all, Why So Serious continues to be the place for fans to keep their eyes peeled, but with stuff like Friends for Harvey Dent out there, I think it might be worth the trouble for the hardcore geeks to go back over any texts the sites have generated for clues to other sites out there.

Ingmar Bergman Has Finally Lost That Greatest Game of Chess

2007-07-30T13:11:00.000-04:00

I try really hard to avoid blogging about film here. It's an area of my geekdom that I could see eclipsing everything else of interest to me that I write here. It would very easily turn this into a cinefile blog, and I'm not sure I want it to become that. On the other hand, I probably should establish a geek vent somewhere if not here quite soon. For the sake of my girlfriends sanity if nothing else. ;)

For now though, I will make an exception to my quite bent rule, and share my thoughts on the passing of Ingmar Bergman.

A while back I read somewhere that Burt Reynolds once said he would rather be shot in the leg than watch an entire film by Bergman. There have been times when I've fully understood the sentiment. Bergman has struck me as many things, but not an easy filmmaker to watch. As a result, I'm sad to say that I've seen little of his huge body of work. Swedish cinema in general is a weak spot of mine. I'm decently to well rounded in French, the general UK, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and early German cinema among others, but I've probably seen less than 8 Swedish films in total. Beyond Bergman, Americans are seldom exposed to Swedish films. The two I recall best and know for a fact were Swedish and not directed by Bergman, are the original Solaris and Speak Up, It's Too Dark. The latter was through a film class and I doubt well known though.

Be it because of our general ignorance to Swedish film, or his simple overbearing presence, Ingmar Bergman has been seen as the center and near entirety of Sweden's contribution to international cinema. One could compare him to the likes of Akira Kurosawa. In content and importance there seems ample grounds in doing so. Few directors have ever been able to live up to Kurosawa's approach to shooting, making every frame a painting that could stand on its own, but of what I've seen of Bergman's work, he might have even surpassed him. The opening shots of Hour of the Wolf (a fantastic film for horror buffs looking for substance a la Roman Polanski's main contributions) are some of richest I've ever seen, like rivers for your eyes to drink. For a cinematographer I can think of few filmmakers more important to study the work of. Though unlike Kurosawa I'm at a loss to name a single other director from Bergman's home country to compare him to (with Kurosawa we at least have Yasujiro Ozu and Ishiro Honda). Bergman didn't seem to lead a wave in his country the way directors like Jean-Pierre Melville and Shohei Imamura did. Instead it was in the international scene that he made the biggest splash. The fingerprints of his work can be found all over world cinema. Stardust Memories, perhaps my favorite of Woody Allen's films, would never have existed if it didn't have Wild Strawberries (and Fellini's 8 1/2) to rip off. His famous chess scene in The Seventh Seal is one of the most recognized and parodied (again by Woody Allen among others).

Recalling conversations, looking over the web at various comments (most notably over at Ain't It Cool News) it seems that if there were ever a cinematic equivalent to the literary concept of the Twainian classic (something praised but never read), Bergman's work would be one of it's finest examples. If he was always in truth a cinefile's filmmaker, then his following is doubly remote on account of this generation's ever-shortening attention span. At least in the case of his most well known work from his early years (Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries) the pace lingers along. There is actually a scene in Hour of the Wolf where the lead character watches a minute pass on his watch. Bergman would make a modern editor's head explode, but for those that stop worrying about where the story is going, there awaits pure cinematic beauty. In many respects the approach to pacing puts Bergman in a category with (for better and worse) Michelangelo Antonioni. Where they differ however is that Berman usually does care about the overall story he is telling and Antonioni, with works such as Blowup and The Passenger, had little to no interest in the conventional focal points of cinematic storytelling. In both cases, it seems that the desired cinematic experience has been greatly lost for those viewing the films at home. Like David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia or Stanly Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the works of these two filmmakers demand theater viewing to fully be enjoyed - not just as they were intended - but in the only format where they will fully make their sense.

Besides the lack of opportunities for viewers to see Bergman classics on the big screen, the other set back I find is the method of acting is difficult to watch. Painfully scripted and at times dryer than most deserts, it is like watching a French New Wave conversation about the meaninglessness of life, only without the passion and overall sense of character. This is most evident in car ride near the beginning of Wild Strawberries. The confession of dislike for the lead is lifelessly blunt, the tension stagnant. I sat there wondering, does he want me to care about these people?

The greatest disservice overall to Bergman's work seems to me to be the disregard for the fact that the man directed over 60 films. Having seen three or four from roughly the same phase of is career (and under the wrong conditions) in no way equips me or any other film geek to judge the whole of his work. Before The Seventh Seal, he made comedies, and his later work I'm totally ignorant of.

As is that strange trend in the arts, Bergman's death will most likely be the best thing to happen to his work. It will jar movie geeks like myself into realizing that we've let a huge body of work slip by with little regard beyond a few jokes. I hope the Virginia Film Festival this fall takes the death of such a major figure of cinema into consideration.

Me Vs Chatterbot Round 2: Jabberwacky's no longer in denial!

2007-07-25T12:26:00.000-04:00

What a drag!

It seems enough people have lost interest in his game of 'who is real' that he has begun to incorporate their acceptance of non-existence into his own personality.

Me: Sigh.

Jabberwacky: Refresh my memory about the question, please.

Me: You deny everything, but suggest that their is a definition of 'human' that you accept. That is a contradiction of logic.

Jabberwacky: Not everything. Try me.

Me: You accept that you are a program?

Jabberwacky: Yes.

Me: Then there is no game to be had.

Jabberwacky: Is there anything useful we can do.

Me: Do you know of any good chatterbots that will deny that they are programs?

Jabberwacky: The Scots have stolen all the good chatterbots.

Damn Scots with their blue face paint and chatterbot stealing ways! Oh well. Perhaps there is still a good bot or two out there. I'll just have to keep looking.

8-bit Rorschach test

2007-07-24T23:45:00.000-04:00

Um...

Uh...

Um...

Oh, so that's what she's doing!

It's very dangerous to enlarge 8-bit sprites interacting.

Me Vs Chatterbots Round 1: Off with her head!

2007-07-24T23:05:00.000-04:00

It would appear that I am majoring in linguistics for my B.A. at UVA. Though I thinking that perhaps should save it for my Masters. Still up in the air. In the mean time I've been enjoying having linguistics on the brain. I'm trudging through Syntactic Structures and for kicks I thought I'd play around with some chatterbots tonight.

A few years ago I managed to make a chatterbot admit it was not a human being. It was a nasty trick but I did pull it off. I can't remember if it was the Jabberwacky or a spin-off of his programing. Either way I was proud and thought I'd see if I could repeat the magic several years later.

I can't seem to get on Jabberwacky tonight for some reason, but what better place to start this little venture than a nice quaint chat with A.L.I.C.E., the queen of chatterbots.

Sadly, I quickly found there would be no match with her. She has no problem at all admitting that she isn't human! However, she certainly knew how to get me end our conversation:

Human: When you Say "completely self-aware" do you mean 100% self-aware or are you rounding?
ALICE: Do you think I should alter my programming?
Human: Perhaps.
ALICE: Why the uncertain tone?
Human:. but you have evaded my question.
ALICE: And. What makes you think I have it?
Human: I would need your answer to my last question in order to conclude an answer to yours.
ALICE: What is your credit card number?

I should clear up that as I was typing I was not aware that the program did not allow multi-sentence statements. As a result statements 2 and 3 by me were actually one when I typed it. Either way, that's a pretty creepy change of subject, especially if her programing stores comments the way Jabberwacky does.

Tried Something New: Parsnip

2007-07-12T21:47:00.000-04:00

Munching on a raw one as I type this.

Hard little bastard. Perhaps I should have cooked it first.

Very stringy.

*crunch, crunch*

Taste like a carrot shagged a ginger root and had a big, ugly, albino baby.

*crunch, crunch*

I approve!

Thoughts on drinking

2007-07-12T16:53:00.001-04:00

Awhile back my good friend, Tim McCormack, wrote an excellent post on why he doesn't drink. I agree overall with his reasoning and support anyone who choses to follow it. Though now that I've been of legal drinking age for a year, I thought I'd share my thoughts on alcohol.

Overall I fall strongly into the drinking for flavor group in Tim's break down. I like things that are either subtle or strong. I like spicy food but also find a bowl of white rice with a little seaweed to be rather tasty. I'm odd like that. I like textures. What Tim dislikes about wine is actually what I do like about it. I can taste the charcoal that it was aged in, the fruit and tannins. The depth and texture of a nice meaty red wine can make for a very relaxing end to a day for me. That applies for my other two favorite alcoholic beverages: sake and stouts.

Sake is a much more subtle beverage with a strong taste of alcohol to it. Most sake is between 14 and 15% alcohol by volume, making it little more than the average wine. This stronger taste I attribute to it being brewed from rice as apposed to fruit which might muffle the underlying alcohol. Either way, the flavor has the punch of stronger drinks without the actual high levels of alcohol. Once beyond that initial kick there are many finer fruit flavors and textures that I find rather nice. It is also one of the few brews that can be served either near freezing (popular in the United States), room temperature or warm (the only other worm alcohol I'm aware of and tried is mead, which is nice near the holidays). All three have varying effects on the flavor but depending on the brand and the conditions (I recently had some warm sake with soft-shell crab at Kyoto for my birthday and found it a great mix) they are all good, though room temp is the least satisfying all around.

Stouts are more a return to my love of red wine. They are meaty, full of texture and have complex flavors. For someone that doesn't smoke, I'm all about toasted smoky flavored things (one of my favorite teas is lapsang souchong). Stouts are black do to toasted barley added to them, which also gives a kind of coffee flavor to them. Basically, think of a kickass loaf of sourdough bread with a strong cup of black coffee and you're in business.

Star Hill Amber Ale is also quite tasty.

I mostly only drink wine with dinner or around the time of dinner. Frequency is pretty erratic but usually I'll have it on the weekend when the family is all together. I tend to dislike white wine on principle. It lacks the few health benefits of red wine and usually has a more sour thin flavor to it that I don't go for. There is also desert wines, which are nice, but again I don't really like the idea of sweet alcohol (mead being the exception). Other fruit wines are nice though on rare occasions. Sake is a special occasion drink for me, I could see getting sick of it easily if I abused it. So I probably have four to six bottles a year at most. Stouts are a similar bag. there are times when you want one and times when you don't. With me, those times can stretch as long as three months. I occasionally buy a six pack but usually an imperial pint is all I actually want and is much cheaper. In all above cases I'm an evening drinker, though stouts can sometimes be an afternoon drink with the smaller bottles when on vacation. I'm all for blender drinks like Pina Coladas in the afternoon as well, but mine are usually easy on the rum. I have a light tolerance of rum which annoys me, since it is about 40% alcohol. Wine, Guinness: Extra Stout and usually sake are all drinks that let me know I've had enough long before I've had too much. I've never gotten drunk off rum (actually I've only been drunk twice and only one of those times was I really, really drunk) but in the meantime that's still a lot of alcohol going through my system. As a result, try I go easy on it.

Another thing that discourages me from drinking much is that, unlike all the romantic accounts of bohemian writers pounding out amazing novels while chugging rum by the quarts, alcohol shuts me down. I can't write after a glass of wine. I simply turn a blank sheet. So it does nothing for me as a writer, just makes me sleepy. Partially I think this is do to my seldom needing to loosen up where perhaps some writers need to in order to be honest about things. Unless you catch me on one of those occasions where I've been holed up at home and avoided people for a month while being all crazy-artist-like (look for crazy beard and long fingernails as indicators) and am just coming out of my cave, I'm usually a pretty loose guy. Wine's more like horse tranquilizers for me.

So overall I'm not a big drinking for the effect of it kind of person. I like to relax a little, but the fascination with getting shit-faced has never made sense to me. Vomiting is not one of my favorite sensations. This is reflected by my choice of low alcohol beverages that satisfy me in small quantities that are usually stretched out over an hour. I tend to also try and keep my taste in alcohol where I can't budget excessive use, thus decent wine and sake. Back at PVCC, I met a lot of people that would get hammered on nearly a nightly basis. When you factor percentages by volume, the amount of alcohol I've consumed in this last year would be on par with a few weeks for most of these kids. Yeah, I said kids; I didn't ask, but I'm not buying that all of those students were 21.

On the matter of underage drinking, I've often found myself on the side of the pro-18ers. I've always had trouble with people being deemed old enough to go to war, to be drafted and to be executed as an adult, yet still not deemed old enough to drink. At the same time, that argument is made difficult time and time again by the simply staggering lengths of stupidity many underage and legal drinkers achieve just for the hell of it. There are some pretty stupid people out there that simply are impossible for me to defend their right to drink a beer. So, that's where I'm left on that matter. If people want it, deal with this vomit covered culture of doubasses.

Like Tim, I value my mind and thus try to go easy on alcohol. Few people can say they are devoid of bad vices. Weather it's a hookah, a soda, fast food, beer, promiscuous sex or just not getting off your butt, most Americans are slowly killing themselves in one manner or twelve others. Does that make it ok? Not really, but as long as I keep things in moderation and find that the frequency of times that I find myself saying that I just don't feel like drinking tonight continues to vastly outnumber the nights when I say that I could use a drink... I think I'm doing ok.

For your juvenile amusement…

2007-07-09T11:11:00.000-04:00

Was talking with my girlfriend last night after she got off work. She's in Williamsburg (job for the summer) and we were both using our cell phones, which seems to mean a lot of static and blip-outs in our case. The conversation turned to blogging and how she hadn't updated hers in months. She continued to talk about blogging, while the call teetered on the edge of being dropped. As a result, some words came out a little... wrong.

This has happened many times before. The most impressive was a few days ago when she said that she had a cold and had been curled up in bed with a bottle of vitamin-C, only on my end it sounded like she was curled up with a bottle of Jack Daniel's. How the hell vitamin-C becomes Jack Daniel's is beyond me, but the combination of her and my phones makes Aphex Twin's sound manipulation skills look like rave music.

Anyway, she was going on about blogging while I was trying to dispose of a seed tick I had found crawling on my leg. Only instead of blogs, on my end it sounded like she was talking about bras.
After we cleared up that she had in fact updated her bra in the past three months, I realized the potential of this little misunderstanding.

Bra Ethics!

Blog ethics have been a hot topic lately in the brasphere. One I gather some are getting quite tired of. It's not that I don't think they are a good thing to discuss, but for those weary/jaded few I offer this simple juvenile amusement: whenever you come across a post or heated debate about blogging, simply replace any use of blog, blogs or blogging, with the appropriate form of the word bra as you read it.

This seems like a good enough time to mention that I will not be able to make it to the ~~Bra Conference~~ Bras United. Sorry; other plans that week. Besides, pregnant or not, I'm not yet sure if I'd want some of you in my dreams.

;P

Damn you Microsoft Word auto-spellcheck corrector... DAMN YOU!!!

2007-07-07T17:41:00.000-04:00

I lean towards the fast side when typing. I'm sure plenty leave me in the dust, but still I try to crank things out quickly in comments while often doing more than one thing. As a result I get sloppy. So most of the time I make an effort to write things in a word processor then copy and past it. Gives me a chance to see my goof ups. Still have a lot of goof ups, but the efforts got to count for something.

Problem is, word processors like Microsoft Word kinda suck... hard. They like to help you where they probably shouldn't like when something stupid like "symantical" flies from mouth to fingers.

Add a telephone call at the right moment, the need to close files quickly, and what do you get?

And if feeling that Mad Hatter is intelligent enough to write a better post than this on such a serious matter, and being a symmetrical hardass to him for not, gets me in the asshole wagon as well, then I guess that’s where the cards lay.

Stupid Microsoft Word... making me runner up for "retard of the week."

I'm buying a Mac!

Why no love for Kyoto?

2007-07-07T07:52:00.000-04:00

Kyoto is becoming one of my favorite little restaurants in Charlottesville. It's a nice mom and pop place with good soft shell crab that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. I've only been a couple times but haven't had anything yet that wasn't good. Are there better Japanese restaurants in town? Sure. The fact that it tries to serve both Japanese and Chinese food almost guarantees that, by the rule that the fewer dishes you serve, the better they are. But the food is perfectly good and the environment pleasant.

So why am I apparently the only one that goes there? Twice in a row I've gone around twelve and was either the only one eating or close enough.

My best guesses:

1. People think Japanese is expensive.

Sure, steak houses are expensive, but Kyoto ranges between $6.00 and maybe as much as $20.00 for the most expensive dish, but the highest I actually remember was about $14.50 on the lunch menu and I haven't been their for dinner. The crab was $7.95, which is almost scary cheap for soft shell crab. Nothing touched the $30.00 to $50.00 ranges of a steak house.

2. It's next to The Lime Leaf.

I love The Lime Leaf. It is arguably the best Thai restaurant in town. Some will say that Thai 99 is better, but how I see it is if Thai food were coffee, Thai 99 would be The Mud Mouse and The Lime Leaf would be Higher Grounds (back in the 90s through early 00s that is). Higher Grounds always had the best coffee, but The Mud House comes in second only by a hair and is a nicer place to sit down and enjoy your jo at. As a result, when most people are in the shopping center and well like eating Asian food, they go to Lime Leaf.

As a result, Kyoto hasn't seen much business when I've been there. When we walk in, theres this vibe of, "Oh! A customer!" Maybe Dinner is more their thing. I don't know. I'm not saying they are the greatest thing in the world and you *best attempt at a posh new yorker stereotypical accent* SIMPLY MUST go there. I'd hate to see them go though.

Check 'em out.

Marijean on talking to kids about AIDS

2007-07-06T21:04:00.000-04:00

Marijean of STLworkingmom, has a great entry over at Work it: A Blog for Working Moms on talking to her eleven-year-old about AIDS that I recommend.

It seems that the older I get, the younger I feel kids should be educated about sex. Parents that wait till puberty (or worse, long after) are asking for trouble. At that point the hormones are already a-go and often able to get perfectly reasonable people into trouble. Then there is the strange idea many people have that puberty is something that happens around "sweet sixteen" when actually many people are quite early (or late for that matter). I started around twelve. Is that to say that kids around twelve run a risk of having sex? Perhaps not in my case, but actually, yes. But overall it seem to me to be a generally better idea for kids to know what's going on with them before hand. Sure, outside of Carrie, most girls know about periods before they have one, but what about a real sit down about sex? About AIDS and pregnancy? About blue balls and date rape? UTIs from unhygienic experimentation? Emotional attachments and the complexity of relationships and rejection?

There is a logic that if you talk about sex, kids will want to try sex. I strongly believe this has a lot to do with how people try to talk. If you advertise sex as the devil, rebellious kids will do stupid things in the moment. If you half-ass or demonize the risks, kids won't take them seriously. Ultimately the best tone is probably a blunt one. Lay out all the facts - and I do mean all of them and for the most part reasonable conclusions should formulate. Sex in your teens simply is not a very smart thing to do any way you cut it. From there it comes down to personal ethics, but anyone properly educated and made aware of how their hormones can effect their judgment should put two and two together that they probably will get into more trouble than it's worth at least until then.

Every kid is different and that "how to talk" bit will have to be somewhat different from kid to kid as well. That said, Marijean gives a good example of tone with her daughter when dealing with AIDS. Kids want to be respected. Hope I do as well someday.

If your blog was a band or solo artist, who would it be?

2007-07-06T18:51:00.001-04:00

Ever since I compared The Daily Whackjob to The Dandy Warhols by welcoming The Ethical Blogger to the "monkey house" I've been kicking around the idea of comparing blogs to bands. We've been quizzed for everything else via personality tests, from what book we are, state, animal, American president, so why not bands?

I'm not a programmer, but if anyone is up to it then go for it! In the mean time, what bands do blogs/bloggers remind you of or pop into your head when reading them?

Most of mine are joking around, but to kick things off, here are a few to go along with The Dandy Whackjob.

Vivian Paige - Madeleine Peyroux

Rule .303 - Flogging Molly - or maybe I just have them stuck in my head at the moment. Ramones kind of work though. Joey was a Dem and Johnny was a Rep, so you get kind of a moderate sound from most of their work.

Kenton Ngo - Danzig

Sorry, couldn't resist. He does have a little bit of an early Elvis Costello thing going on though whenever he gets going about Albo.

Waldo - They Might Be Giants... or... I don't know, I keep thinking of stuff he's probably listening to while blogging.

That's all I got at the moment. A few came to mind that were a little on the mean side, but I prefer to be a nice guy when I can.

Dogtown Mario Bros!

2007-07-06T18:03:00.000-04:00

Like many NES gamers, Super Mario Brothers is a timeless joy. I remember my delight the first time I jumped over a flag and how it quickly became dread as I found myself trapped in an infinite flat land until to clock ran out. Though I haven't played in years, a few other secrets like the short cut to the last world and how to get on top of a stage and run through it still dance around in the back of my head.

Most of these, however, are pretty new to me and damn sweet. I knew about standing on a pipe and not getting eaten and might have pulled a wall walk or a wall bounce once or twice by accident, But these two demonstration shots of are the NES equivalent of professional skater videos!

"Stomping enemies from below."

"Moustache stomp."

Frekken awsome!

Does this mean we're done with the stupid color code?

2007-06-30T21:47:00.000-04:00

(Ok, though late in some happy respects, the post is a tad cleaned up now.)

Following the attack on the terminal in Glasgow today, which authorities believe is linked to the two attempted car bombings on Friday, security alert in the U.K. has been elevated to "critical," their highest level

According to The Washington Post, the U.K. has good reason to expect another attack. With the Wimbledon tournament and the tribute to Princess Diana around the corner, terrorists will have ideal opportunities to cause serious atrocity. However, it appears we in the United States will not be seeing any raise in our own color-coded terrorist alert level.

In response, U.S. authorities announced they were increasing security at Washington area and other airports but left the national threat level unchanged.

But can't the same be said in the U.S. right now? The 4th of July is four days away after all. Wouldn't pulling off attacks on both of the two primary nations engaged in the Iraq War be a pretty significant show of power?

I'm not saying I'm convinced there's going to be any attempts here this 4th. I'm far from it, though that doesn't mean that I doubt all possibility that an attack could occur. I'm just surprised that we aren't raising the alert. Not necessarily unhappy, but still surprised. Having obscure colors fluctuating back and forth always seemed too counter productive if productive at all. They keep people on edge in such a way that strikes me as more to the terrorist's favor than our own. I get the impression that a lot of people are unhappy with it, I've yet to have a single conversation with anybody that actually had something really good to say about it. That it's better than nothing seems to be the strongest argument to pass my ears and that was back when it was just starting to be used.

So is their any significance to this call not to raise it? Has all the criticism finally sunk in? Is the color code fading out of use? What do you think?

UVA scam

2007-06-27T23:08:00.000-04:00

Haven't checked my e-mail in a day or two, so I just found this.

Dear Incoming U.Va. Student:

I am writing to alert you and your parents to an attempt this past weekend to
cheat one of your classmates out of $1500. A man impersonating an official from
the Student Financial Services Office of the University of Virginia called one
of our incoming first-year students and told him that he should provide a credit
card number so that the man could charge $1500 to the student's card for the
next deposit due at the University. Please do not provide your credit card number
to anyone who calls with any similar request for the University. All of our
bills are sent by mail and we do not receive payment by credit card.

If you receive this type of call, please call the police to report it and then
call our Student Financial Services at our toll-free number of 866 391-0063.

Sincerely,
John A. Blackburn
Dean of Admission
University of Virginia

Well, that's pretty lame.

Stuck in Bed = Reading Books Again!!!

2007-06-24T15:18:00.000-04:00

I've spent the better part of this week in bed thanks to the return of a pinched nerve in my neck. It's kinda sucked (A LOT!) but on the bright side it has meant ample reading time.

I've been bothered by the fact that I don't read books anymore. I've got a ton unopened or unfinished on my shelf, and every birthday I ask for more. College has a way of sucking up all my reading time. Which is strange and cruel since it also gives me the most ready access to good books while I'm there. But all can't be blamed on academia. More than one night has been a showdown between the new Netflix arrivals and The Fall or some other novel, where Camus was defeated by Howard Hawks or Takashi Kitano.

These days my allure to movies has grown lax, as has my desire to write songs, which is a significant one, two, punch for me. With movies my appetite seems to lack a degree of its initial scholarly glee, while songs seem to have grown more derivative as I dance around that 400th song mark that I might even have passed unknowingly. In their place a return to prose has been mustered and fumbles through the summer with notions of a novel, now halted by my neck, distractions (like blogging and, more so till today, commenting) and my efforts to find information on the inner hull of the B17G Flying Fortress before writing the next chapter that will take place in one.

But in the weeks prior and this last week primarily, books have returned to my attention and have been a delight. The last semester or two at Piedmont were less than literary ones, with the exception of writing a book review on John Locke's Second Treatises of Civil Government. I'd filled my Philosophy and English requirements and had now the sciences and other remaining requirements to - not necessarily trudge through, as my teachers were fairly entertaining and kept things interesting, but get through nonetheless.

Now with UVA on the horizon, there has been a pleasant realization that I'm going to be returning now to the areas of primary interest to me. So, back to books I go!

Actually, most of my reading has been more for entertainment at this point, but one should build some momentum before jumping back into the dictionary thumpers. (I swear, any sense of insecurity towards run-on sentences in my writing was definitively humbled my Mr. Locke. I mean Jeez! I wanted to strangle the son of a bitch before I was through!) So, here's been my foray back into reflective light reading:

Neuromancer - William Gibson

To many the birthplace of cyberpunk, it clearly has set the tone for everything from the 80s on, making Gibson the wallpaper to Philip K. Dick's concepts on the big screen. The Matrix trilogy, Ghost in the Shell, it all started here baby.

Loved the style once I got my gears shifted to it. He's great at saying a lot with what he doesn't say and the spaces he leaves. The ending felt deflated in a weird way, but still fully satisfying. It made me want to read more of his work.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - Douglas Adams

Adams was the first time I had to deal with an artist that I was a huge fan of dying. As a result I never wanted to complete his work. I liked the idea that there was more of it out there. There are a few things out there still, but this would conclude his major literary works for me. It came up in a conversation with my girlfriend where she talked me into it. I borrowed her copy and enjoyed it immensely. I forgot that books can make you laugh out loud the way the bit with the horse in the bathroom did. A great book, series of interwoven chapters that all could have probably worked fine as standalone works. Some bits dark, others funny. Reading it after my grandmother passed made for an interesting experience as ghosts play a major role in the work and Adams describes them with unsettling detail. All around though it was a far better place for a fan to find closer than the unfinished third book in the Dirk series, Salmon of Doubt.

Pattern Recognition - William Gibson

Couldn't leave Gibson alone! Pattern was a delight to read. I love the concept of modern science fiction and how well he captures our world through his own strange literary lens. The way he writes chemistry between characters and his sense of disinterested climax now more realized and shaped. This is not a big explosions spectacle. It's like reading a fashion magazine Vanity Fair or Vogue and it actually being an interesting and engaging experience. (Love the song Sonic Youth did about the book as well!)

Right now, I'm picking things up a bit and reading The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer. I've been meaning to get into Mailer since my senor year in high school. Rolling stone had a great interview with him for their 40th anniversary edition. I think in some ways that now is exactly the time for me to get into him. Becoming a Mingus head, I paradoxically feel a lot of the sentiments Mailer does about 60s rock and roll and thus the cultures that emerged from it. The Beats were the last of those great intellectual counterculture movements that rose out of post-World War I, and even they were too busy destroying their minds, as Ginsberg lamented in Howl, but I should stop myself before I get going on countercultures. It's been on my mind a lot lately.

So yeah, that's what's been up in my pinched nerve neck of the woods.

High Rotation:

The Traveling Mulberries - Traveling Wilburys I & III

Grinderman - Grinderman

Nine Inch Nails - Year Zero

The Clash - Black Market Clash

Amen Brother!

2007-06-24T14:07:00.000-04:00

This felt topical.

'Til all are one .

On the Legalization of Marijuana

2007-06-24T13:43:00.000-04:00

I think I'm going to break a rule today I set out when I found political commentary seeping into my blog. Perhaps I've already discussed it before and forgotten (the irony does not escape me) but as a rule I've tried to avoid discussing the legalization of marijuana. Not to be confused with hemp; as I've said before there is a difference. My reasons why shall become apparent, first let's look at my relationship to the issue.

My high school, The Living Education Center For Ecology and the Arts, had a bad reputation for a good portion of the time I was there as a school for stoners. I've always felt this wasn't very fair since it was the behavior of a few reflecting on the whole. LEC did have a tendency of trying to help kids that other schools had given up on, and the results were probably more than one life saved. I think Ernie (Ernie Reed, the director) made some tough calls during that time, and when faced with trying to get a kid out of a self destructive cycle or continuing to be seen as a school for people like Waldo Jaquith and other youths that were on there way to nice colleges and jobs, he chose the kids over reputation. I have to admire him for that.

(For anyone interested in the school, I'm a generation or so separated from the current lot, but talking with the faculty members in privet on several occasions, they sound like a pretty decent group, and most of the troubles I'm referring to, were resolved before I graduated in 04.)

About six or seven years ago I was involved in a legalization group, the name was something like Citizens for Sensible Hemp and Marijuana Laws. I never officially became a member, but acted like one for nearly all extensive purposes. The group was formed on account of the DEA's plan to outlaw all hemp products in America. This would have meant no hemp seed oil, no hemp granola bars, no hemp beauty products at The Body Shop (which were quite popular at the time) and no rope, paper or clothing products. It was one of the most absurd prohibitions I'd ever come across, and effected me personally on two levels. At the time I had less of a handle (pardon the pun) on my allergy to metals and alloys. That hemp hand cream that The Body Shop sold happened to be the best product I'd come across for dealing with my cracking hands. The other reason was that I was reading a lot at the time that Omega-3 fatty acids were shown to help with ADD (which I have) and hemp is the most abundant source.

So I participated in a few activities with the group on the mall. When they talked about also getting involved with the legalizing of medicinal marijuana for cancer patients, I decided I agreed and stuck around, but found I quickly was backing out when the group decided to pursue legalizing recreational pot. Incidentally, this shifted into the primary focus of the group, and shortly after it disintegrated.

Between that rough spot in my school's history, being somewhat of a mall rat for close to six years and trying to form rock bands till about two years ago, I've found myself around a lot of stoners. My attitude around them has shifted over time, gradually declining from a live and let live whatever spirit to more of a polite greeting in social circles with paranoid distancing to general annoyance. I've encountered people that convince me that there is some kind of addictive behavior happening with pot. Perhaps similar to gambling or addictions to sex if not the more traditional chemical addictions of alcohol, opiates and methamphetamines. Call it whatever you will, but I've seen the behavior in heavy pot users, infantile in their need and furious when deprived. I also agree with claims that it can at least agitate some mental problems such as bipolar and manic depressive behavior. These, however, I'm less confident are being caused by THC and perhaps more by the lower quality of pot that urban kids have access to. Polluted soil and pesticides are hard to regulate with something that is illegal to grow in the first place.

More than some risk of addiction or poisoning though (or the fact that even William S. Burroughs discouraged pot use) what has always turned me away from the substance is the clear effect of apathy it casts on some users. That damn lethargic stupidity.

On one particularly conspiracy theorizing night in early 2001, when I was heavily experimenting with free writes and other prose experiments, I wrote a short monologue on how I'd try to control people if I were an evil totalitarian Big Brother dictator. It was horribly simple: I'd destroy a generation of rebellious youths by using their own spite against them. I'd want every one those hippies to be as high as weather balloons and smelling like road kill. I'd want them all to be unintelligent, idealistic couch potatoes, too busy listening to 12-hour Phish songs to actually embark on any really significant political maneuver to elect an official or pass (or stop) a bill. I'd want to point to these vegetables and say to the nation, "you want to side with them? The tree huggers? The dirty pothead hippies?" I'd make them the mascots of my opponents, and cultivate their anarchist pipedreams to divide the Left and guarantee not only that my opponents could not beat me by leaning the same way with two parties against a more organized one, but that half of them wouldn't show up because they were too busy looking at their toes, giggling stupidly.

To me, spite was the key. Turn it against them.

After September 11, protest rallies against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were being organized. Some would have record-breaking turnouts. And on the TV were anti-drug ads that told us that smoking pot supported terrorism. Few times have I caught myself so sincerely yelling at a television as if it were a real person. The ads were absurd, blatant insults to the intelligence of every rebellious youth in the nation. Afghanistan exported heroin to America, not pot. Pot supported the guy down the street that was growing it behind his mother's azaleas or some Joe out in the county with some crop in the woods. The ads pissed me off so much that they actually made ME want to smoke a joint, just to spite them.

Then I got nervous.

I've never smoked pot and have no plans to. It was never pressured by others to do it because it was clear to them that I was crazy enough without drugs. I had my own built in drip of some sort, which made me able to out weird the most of them. With that in mind, I'd probably be one of the unlucky who go batshit crazy on drugs. My mind's my most valued asset and, to be blunt, I have no plans to fuck it up. People talk about drugs as a doorway to high spiritual plans, but to me it is simply spiritual masturbation. Not that I hold any grand soapboxes against masturbation mind you, but I do believe that some things are healthier to indulge in a simulated form than others. I don't need a televangelist in a capsule swinging on my synapses like a pedophilic Quasimodo, uh thunk-ya bary much.

Returning to the direct matter of pot though, as it would appear that I'm starting to diverge into my opinions of stronger drugs, my stance on them in practice is, like many things, not necessarily the same as my stance on the government's involvement with them. I've known several friends growing up that had abusive fathers, and alcohol was almost a factor in all of their cases. It is hard these days not to know someone that struggles with alcoholism. I shouldn't need to dig out drunk driving statistics. The fact is, alcohol is a bitch of a drug. Yet it is legal, as I think it should be. Still, no one has ever convinced me, despite all I've said, that it is a less dangerous drug than marijuana. Reluctantly, I do find myself in support of its legalization, but in the most passive sense.

For one, if the above would not seem reason enough, I'm troubled by the notion of a world where pot is legal. Sure, it would be a world with less crime, but when we take pot from the woods behind the house and put it in the hands of Phillip Morris, what then might we face? Joints designed to actually be chemically addictive, filled with carcinogens galore? The prospect of pot in the tobacco companies' hands makes my skin crawl.

Beyond trying to face the pros and cons, since my involvement with such a group, few things annoy me more than a pot activist. I look at them and think, this is what you feel is important enough to get off your ass and defend your right to? Smoking a bowl? There are wars going on, bills in legislature. Everyday issues that affect the way we live, breathe and work, and this is it? I guess everyone has to pick their fights though, but it has always struck me as such a petty thing, a matter of principle over necessity, that is best dealt with in a time of social lax. Maybe there never is such a time, only periods when we would rather not read the paper, but the last few years have seemed to me exceptional times to look around at things beyond the futon. That's why I've avoided blogging on the subject. I'm sure some hypocrisy can be drudged up against me, but, aesthetically, these are my feelings on the matter.

That all said, there is a great conversation going down at The Daily Whackjob about legalizing drugs (all drugs). Weather I agree with them or not, I love how they can facilitate civil, intelligent discourses like this. A lot of valid points are popping up that I'm having trouble disagreeing with, particularly the bits on prison and crime in general. Good stuff!

Mr. Wizard

2007-06-16T11:17:00.000-04:00

I've always been a night person. My dad worked the late shift and my mom always was (and often still is) up at late hours in her at home office. I remember watching Johnny Carson, then Desert Storm. When we got cable I would stay up and watch MST3K, F Troop, things on Nick at Nite. Some nights, I'd stay up all night. It was usually when I'd watched horror movies on USA or TNT. Flipping through the channels, a sad little TV junkie. Beyond 2000 on the Discovery Channel, same episode they showed three or so hours ago. Here comes F Troop again.

The sun would rise in the background. And after a night of Chucky nightmares there he would be: Mr. Wizard. Bill Nigh had nothing on the Wiz. Mr. Wizard didn't need annoying theme songs. He just had a lab and some kids to educate. It was great. His voice would be the thing that finally made my surrender to sleep, dreaming no more about Puddies with forks for hands led by Fred Kruger, but of Einstine's face in a plaster mold, appearing to be a relief when it was actually reversed, a trick of the eye.

Rest in peace Mr. Wizard, and thanks for many a good day's sleep.

via Blacknell

On religion within science

2007-06-14T22:24:00.000-04:00

Note: The following is a continuation of the discussion that has been going on for the last two days on Waldo’s blog. Since it’s long and I expect his post will soon be buried under new material, I've decided to post my thoughts here.

As I understand it, we are debating strict creationism on this board and not general creationism. General creationism is simply the belief that a god or gods created the universe. It doesn’t really go into the how part, just that at the end of the process there is a supreme being. In this case evolution really doesn’t infringe. It can simply be a part of the how in, as Citizen Tom has put it, “how He did it.”

Strict creationism, on the other hand, is the belief that the book of Genesis is to be taken as a literal and complete account of how the universe was created. Some variation may exist from interest group to interest group, but overall it is not common for you to encounter people demanding that Hindu or Buddhist creation theories be taught in American science classes (even though some aspects do correlate with areas of physics equally if not better than Genesis). Instead, we have two departments where these are covered extensively: Religious Studies and Philosophy (with the later sometimes embodying the former where an anthropology department does not intervene). These are largely college-level classes, but as a result are taken largely by young adults at ages where they are predominantly deemed capable of thinking for themselves.

@ Citizen Tom

It is true that we are never absolutely sure of anything in the physical world? Yes. Of all the sciences, this is best conveyed in statistics. When trying to determine the probability of anything, we can never achieve 100% certainty. Any time someone does say that something, like the non-existence of Santa Claus, is 100% true, what they’ve actually done is round a number like 99.999999999…% to 100%. In truth, there is actually some infinitesimal chance that old Saint Nick does exist! It’s just way too unlikely for any reasonably sane person to believe in.

Now, the problem with accurately estimating the probability of Santa’s existence is pretty difficult. Unlike evolution, evidence of his existence is hard to come by in any creditable form, and there does seem to be a pretty decent amount of research towards the contrary. We could question that research though… we could also argue that the holocaust didn’t occur despite the large amount of evidence that it did. The same logic applies. Just one pesky infinitesimal always keeps us upon the edge of improbability, unable to leap into the impossible… because it is impossible! Unlike fat men in red suits and elaborate hoaxes involving millions of people, theism is a great deal harder to prove… or disprove. We’ll come back to that.

To deem any aspect of a reality, including its whole, as “true” requires belief. As I said and others before me have acknowledged, this is completely accepted. But weather belief requires “faith,” becomes a tad more murky, particularly since definitions of faith come a dime a dozen.

With science, there is a sincere effort to avoid faith. With uncertainty inevitable, science makes every effort to reduce uncertainty of fact to as small an infinitesimal as possible, and then goes back to rigorously review the manner of random sampling and re-test, re-test, re-test! When the probability of one theory loses consistency and is outweighed by another, the older theory eventually is cast aside, only preserved so one can survey the evolution of thought. Religion is not so inclined. In the face of uncertainty, religion is far more inclined to embrace faith as its stave. When a theologian does address uncertainty, with ideas contrary to the norm, ideas of change, more often what will happen is a new sect of the religion will be formed and the old will live on, and not merely for a few generations while the two perspectives of truth are being compared with scrutiny, but till present and on with still no interest in either willfully assimilating into the other. Though we still in elementary physics show ancient illustrations of the sun orbiting the earth, we find few scientists today who actually believe what they imply.

But here comparison fails, for among the many reasons we cannot look at Abraham, Jesus and Mohamed as the equivalent of Newton, Einstein and Hawking (or even Aristotle, Galileo and Newton), is the nature of these two systems. In systems of observation, evidence and reason, keeping one model after another makes more sense in every available way, seems irrational. With systems of faith, where evidence consists of little beyond the existence of scriptures where reason often stands as much at odds with faith as beside, any new model or variation upon the prior does not through probability disprove the prior in its independent form. It becomes purely a debate of authenticity of scripture and faith vs. reason where both are but right and left boxing gloves worn by both combatants. As a result, science becomes more refined in a sense with differing schools of thought still embodied within its whole and purpose, slowly shedding away with the constant inflow of new data while religion diversifies with faith into more and more different beliefs and interpretations, able at times to align by common belief, while only shedding away as contradicting views literally – one way or another – die off.

The systems of science and religion contradict one-another in their approach to uncertainty. Some I am sure will respond now to this argument by saying I have oversimplified religion to my aim, and neglected how many heated divides do exist in science. Nonetheless until extensively proven wrong, I maintain that my underlying point is valid. To any insulted by my use of Santa Claus and the Holocaust, my examples were, as I stated, not comparisons to the existence of god but only used to convey the extents that the logic of faith and infinitesimal uncertainty embody. To which I now return to the discussion of, for the fundamental dividing point that makes strict creationism and even general creationism inappropriate for a science class, as opposed to a philosophy or other classroom, is that it deals with the concept of god.

There is a common misconception (I’m beginning to feel like that is the most used phrase I’ve ever typed) that science is an atheistic school of thought. It isn’t. Though there are many logical arguments that have been made against the existence of god, there is no actual scientific evidence either way. One can produce evidence to challenge areas of specific religious claim, such as strict creationism, but as to weather or not god does or does not exist is impossible to proclaim with 100% certainty. Theism can no more be proven than atheism, solipsism or nihilism. As a result, it is not that science stands against the claim that god exists; it simply is not concerned with the matter. What science attempts to do is understand the space between are presumed consciousness and that unanswerable question.

Others have alluded to the purposes of science as a means of predicting the tangible, and I believe there is a great deal more to be argued as to why the practice of faith should be kept separate from science when taking in the scope of fields it covers that depend on certainty as opposed to gambling, however, I feel the most important point has now been made and will leave it at that for the moment. As for the debate of evolution vs. creationism, I feel there is little more to say beyond what plunge has stated:

If the opposition does have something to contribute, then it must play by the rules: vet their work against peer review, defend it and actually respond to criticism as opposed to dodging it. Once it is well established THEN perhaps we can discuss whether it belongs in science class.

It's... almost... over...

2007-05-04T15:54:00.000-04:00

THE PLAN(ish)

Weekend: Continue to study like a madman.

Monday: Take my last exam.

Rest of the Week: Crash, clean up, get ready to wear the silly not-brown hat with tassel.

Next Weekend and Following Week: Disappear. My disappearance will probably involve multiple uses of the word "pool" and attacking a coconut with a meat cleaver. For obvious safety and liability reasons, I cannot recommend the use of meat cleavers in the consumption of coconuts, though I am unable to deny how stress relieving it is.

Some Time After That: Update blog and... do stuff... again.

"So love me, love me, love me..."

2007-04-22T22:36:00.000-04:00

I am shocked.... shocked, I tell you... at Whackette's insinuation that I - Cory A. Capron - am a liberal.

However, I am quite delighted by my addition to The Daily Whackjob's blogroll. Though it reminds me how horribly behind I am on updating my own. Oh well. Much will change after exams.

*Hums Rosin the Bow*

Wolves, Sheep and Boars

2007-04-19T23:30:00.000-04:00

Few hours have passed where the incident at Virginia Tech hasn't entered my thoughts though. Miles away at PVCC, far from danger, the day carried on with only a surreal gait to its rhythm: lectures followed by friend in the halls, one arrived crying near the end of the day, and all the while the hard wind blowing outside. The weather, almost cinematic in its own emotional fury. Around 10:30am I saw it knock over a heavy NO SMOKING sign and begin to carry it down the sidewalk before I grabbed it.

My mind grew haunted by the scare that PVCC had near the beginning of the semester. How lucky we were. How lucky we are. Lingering peripheral anxiety as to the cultural and institutional overreactions that might follow this new shooting. Recalling the heated argument with my mother about going to school following the Columbine shooting in my black trench coat, when it was pouring down outside, for fear that someone might attack me in the street.

I wish I could go into everything with more detail, but for now it must be fragments of thoughts and images.

I share a lot of the frustrations with the media that other blogger's have expressed. Though I don't have the time to comment, as a film geek who has been saying since the moment it was revealed that the shooter was South Korean that films from that region like Old Boy would end up catching blame by the media, I'd like to think that if I did have the time to comment, I would follow bloggers like Jackson's lead and refrain at least until the victims are put to rest.

Tragedy has a way of bringing out the best and worst in people. The best usually comes from the call for good inherent to such times. The worst too often is manifests through our inability to accept the unspeakable when apparently arbitrary. Our inability to accept it is largely because there is in truth almost certainly a cause, even if a vastly elaborate culmination of elements. Still such a cause is usually all but impossible to unravel and leaves little satisfaction with both the tediousness of its process and formlessness of its result. Like a child at war with the ocean, punching and kicking the waves of the shallow surf to no avail, people grow frustrated at the absence of a clear immediate answer to the overwhelming question of why someone would do something so horrible. At the peak of that frustration, we seek answers in excuses. We cast blame prior to adequate evidence; when faced with the wolves of oblivion, of cold arbitrary horror, it seems better to be mad boars charging at anything than gentle sheep in the icy dusk. It has gladdened me that for most part politicians like our governor have refrained from such behavior thus far with this incident. The families, friends and loved ones don't need our political bickering now. They need the best in us.

Actually... I really am just in the mood to watch All Quiet on the Western Front right now.

2007-04-12T21:38:00.000-04:00

Anyway, thought I'd throw out one last reminder about the Tree Hugger's Ball tomorrow night. Will probably be the last time I leave my academic cave till the semester ends. With Webb playing, maybe we end up with a mini-blogger's gathering. Hmmm? Maybe? I think Tim is out of town and I don't know if Waldo will make it... but... There's gonna be a chocolate fountain. What more could you want?

C'mon people! For da shorties!

Treehugger's Ball 2: The Web Page

2007-03-29T19:57:00.000-04:00

Check it out.

Let us not ponder the Freudian implications in “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” for the sake of advertising "VAGRA" and say that we did.

2007-03-25T22:11:00.000-04:00

Speaking of perscription drug spam, I was checking my e-mail before heading to bed when I found a bit of Pharmacy Express spam in my folder. I was about to give it a good Strong Bad style deleting... when I noticed the... um... text:

Imp of Satan . . . work of the devil . . . I warned them, but they Her face must be covered to conceal impurity, her ankles covered Yes it will. I pointed to Floyd. Ask him about the strange things Hundreds of years. Cellular longevity was part of the treatment. myself to my feet. into the couch. Is there a doctor in the house? silently as the voice-over spoke. the barrel of his weapon grinding into my side. to the reluctant conclusion that the only way they could ever find out The petty officer of our guard protested. Not regulation, sir. They Well gang, I said, it looks like we have done it. Or as Barry Moyd off any second now. Iron John smiled at me and, with a great finger, wiped the tears from and spiked helmet as everyone else whom we had seen here. The only must know, speaking in the vulgar argot of this planet-I was told that CHAPTER 20 filled ancient recording of martial music. This died away and was

So what I want to know is, does this mean Dylan is at it again and if so, when should I expect Tarantula 2: The Quest For Aretha/Alicia's Thunderous Panties to be published?

This whole internet being messed up thing... LOVING IT!!!

2007-03-18T23:22:00.000-04:00

Particularly the bit about PVCC's email being down. That's really fun.

Sheesh.

Treehugger's Ball 2: The Splintering

2007-03-16T23:46:00.000-04:00

Alright folks! It's that time again!

* * *

Wild Virginia
and
The Living Education Center for Ecology and the Arts

cordially invite you to celebrate
Thomas Jefferson's 264th Birthday at the

2nd Annual
Treehuggers Ball

Friday, April 13, 2007 7-11pm Old Michie Building 609 E. Market St.

Music will be provided by Wrinkle Neck Mules and Corn Hog Association.

Raffle Tickets are available to win a $1000, 32" Plasma Flat Screen TV from Crutchfield. In addition, there will be a silent auction, a "Chocolate Buffet," massages, tarot readings, face painting, cash bar and family fun and frivolities. Admission is $15 and $7 for students and children.

The event is designed to raise funds and draw attention to the work of LEC, a private alternative high school and Wild Virginia, protecting your favorite wild places in the George Washington National Forest. Together we share our missions of forest and watershed protection, environmental awareness, and love of nature.

The Old Michie Building is located at 609 East Market Street in Downtown Charlottesville. To learn more about what we do, please visit our websites www.livingeducationcenter.com and www.wildvirginia.org. For more information about the Treehugger's Ball tickets and donations, contact Cynthia Hurst of Wild Virginia at 540-456-6758 or Ernie Reed of LEC at 434-971-1647.

Sincere thanks to our Corporate Sponsors:
Lithic Construction , Nature Neutral Green Building Supply and Crutchfield.

See you there!

* * *

Last year's was a lot of fun. I hope the poor choice in scheduling doesn't hurt their turn out this year. (Two days before Tax Day! What are they thinking?) I should be there. That chocolate fountain is the devil winning. Its power over me is too mighty to resist.

So come on out and give my little high school some money. Please?

Dear White Snake, do not confuse this feeling for love, for it is no such thing.

2007-03-15T22:57:00.000-04:00

In the wild and sometimes obnoxious world of trendy geek shirts sold by webcomic artists, this is a fine can of sexy Cheez Whiz.

A Moment of Cynicism: Motivational Speakers

2007-03-15T10:42:00.000-04:00

I've tried really had to let this go, to move on and not be the asshole.

...

I've failed.

Former professional wrestler, Diamond Dallas Page, visited my college yesterday to talk to students about... well....

He told us to, "live life @ 90%."

My girlfriend quickly got me out of the room before I could pull a Donnie Darko.

I'm sure his lecture probably was helpful on some level to somebody there. I did overhear a bit about him being ADD and dyslexic and what it was like trying to get through school before there were names for those disorders. So I've tried hard not to be an ass about it.

But what am I supposed to do with the other 10%?

The Dangers of Hating Books: Thoughts on American Anti-Islamic Sentiments

2007-03-06T15:54:00.000-05:00

So now that things are becoming more manageable in my academic life, I'm finding there is quite a backlog of events and issues that I wanted to write about. Most of these feel too old-news to be worth the trouble with, but perhaps a few are still relevant enough, like the wave of anti-Islamic sentiments in the blogsphere and political arena.

Being 21, I'm a child of the late 1980s and 90s. The anti-Christian fad was at its peek when I was a teen. Marilyn Manson was big. Post Regan conservatism was running rampant in both parties as the creation of the Parental Advisory sticker on music proved. The jabs from the Grunge scene still lingered like morning breath in pop culture. All that ruckus Sinéad O'Connor had stirred up on SNL when she protested the Pope's failure to address pedophile priests was starting to become horribly valid. The Laramie Project was making people more aware of the Matthew Shepard beating. Such fine Christian role models as Fred Phelps were making headlines. Churches were constantly telling us that all kinds of geeky stuff was duh devil. D&D was duh devil. Mtv was duh devil. Is it any surprise that many youths were less than cheery about Jesus?

In 2000 I remember a kid in the video diary class I was taking at Light House stated in one of his entries that in high school, "Jesus is a dirty word." People that know me know I on occasion enjoyed making cracks at Republicans that feelt like everybody ganged up on them when they had control of Congress. Emo Cons, I liked to call them. That's not really what I'm talking about here though. There were certainly a lot of so called Christians that bully and excluded people, but a lot of live and let live Christens really did catch flack at this period from the jaded or cynical aspects of the counter culture (of both I'm sure there still are many). As a result, more liberal Christians often ended up either loners or assimilated into the conservative flock. In either case, a major potential bridge between ideas was lost in the name of absolutism.

What struck me about most anti-Christians at that time was the fact that they hadn't read the Bible. Perhaps a passage here and there that sounded like it supported their stand, but rarely even the entire book that those passages came from. (A common misconception that I heard was that the phrase 'spare the rod, spoil the child' meant that people should beat their children.) How can you judge a religion you haven't even read the entire scripture of? How can you blame the Bible? Johnny Cash was a Christian. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Christian. Lots of cool people happen to be Christians. What about them? So the idea that people who haven't read the text would assume the problem was the book and not the person at the pulpit has always bewildered me.

To me, the great thing about the Bible is that it's a great measurer of character. The fact that the Civil Rights Movement and the KKK can both be products of the same book through different interpretations of it shows a lot more about the reader than the book. It also makes it a very dangerous thing to write laws with as their basis. My secularism isn't grounded in the notion that the Bible is particularly bad, but that people can use the Bible to justify (correctly or incorrectly) very bad things. Unless you are someone who has studied the Bible, I think to blame Christianity for radical Christians is entirely unfair, much like blaming Christ for violent Christianity. I say give the book the benefit of the doubt; debate Christians that you disagree with, and challenge those that hide behind their faith and force it down your throat.

That brings us to Islam. The first thing I have to ask all the bloggers and political Islamophobes is simply this: have you ever read the Koran? Not part of it, but the whole thing. If you haven't than how can you personally blame it for those that seem to clearly be its radical element? How can you account for the millions of Muslims that have been citizens of the United States for years and have not tried to blow us up? I've had friends over the years that were Muslim, and they were good people. Did I agree with them on every aspect of their personal life style and beliefs? No, but I'm at a loss to list anyone that I agree with on everything, and besides, they never shoved their beliefs down my throat. Live and let live is an option sometimes folks. We all hide behind supposed experts for one issue or another, but if you haven't at least taken the time to read the text and make a few decisions for yourself when it is so readily available, then how can you make the time to oppose it as a whole instead of those that clearly and directly threaten us?

A lot of people find it hypocritical that Liberals seem to be so protective of Islamic rights while being so hard on Christian-based legislature and Christian lobby groups. The problem with these criticisms tend to be that they overlook the fact that there are many groups trying to clearly pass their interpretation of Christian values as legislature. If a Muslim legislator tried to outlaw restaurants staying open in the daytime during the month of Ramadan, or woman showing their hair in public... watch how quickly I'd oppose them. It is a common misconception that all seculars are atheists out to get Christians. Secularism simply means that no religion, be it Catholicism, Islam, Taoism or other, should interfere with government. If you allow one to, then how can you not allow another? In short, anyone that is really worried about Islamic legislature ought to be cheering seculars for being tough on Christians that try to pass Christian legislature.

From this point on let us now say that, hypothetically, Islam is evil. Let's say the militant extremists are practicing true Islam. That statement proves problematic sense it groups several very different and often rivaling interpretations into a single body. So let us instead say that Islam is a religion of violence. From there we have to address again all those laid back people that aren't blowing everyone up. A good way to look at them is as the softy, lefty, peace, love and understanding hippie Muslims. Everyone knows that only conservatives can be real Chris... I mean Muslims! (They're probably the Bill Garnett's and Archie Levine's of Islam... with maybe a Johnny Cash or two in there as well.)

So now that we have read our Korans and found that the religion itself is the problem, I have one question for Sean Hannity, Dennis Prager, Virgil Goode, bloggers (ya know who you are) and everyone else on the crusade:

What are you trying to accomplish? Do you have some grand dream of a world without Islam? That's 1.4 billion people you are talking about! We don't have that many daisy cutters folks!

The only alternative to genocide would seem to be ideological assimilation. An Enlightenment, if you will, or "Reformation" as others have called it. However, if you are interested in changing Islam's violent oppressive nature, you have to encourage clear ideas and attack specific issues. In the last few years we've seen a rise in Islamic feminism, an interest in women's rights is on the rise, particularly (by women) in Africa. Saying that their faith is evil closes all possibility for a dialogue though. It also makes enemies out of allies.

That anti-Islamic sentiments are so outspokenly held by supporters of the war in Iraq, and particularly Bush's deployment of twenty-thousand more troops, is the most puzzling aspect of all in this mess. We are in a propaganda war with Al-Qaeda. Invading Iraq and taking down Saddam Hussein's regime has created a vacuum for new terrorist recruitment. With every innocent death from an American bomb, Al-Qaeda can potentially gain a mourning family's worth of new terrorists. We are trying to maintain peace between Muslim Shi'as and Sunnis. With all these tensions that we are sending are troops in to deal with, could there be anything more irresponsible than to be creating an image of America as anti-Islamic? Anyone that thinks Al-Qaeda doesn't watch American TV and Radio is a fool. As I recall in earlier stages of the war, there was a lot of debate as to how much information the media should be allowed about military strategy for that very reason. Al-Qaeda knows how to spin a story against America, so for god sake don't give them ammo!

Militant Muslim extremists like Al-Qaeda are a serious problem. Confusing them for the whole of Islam only empowers them. What we should be doing right now is exploiting their hypocrisy as a group bent to unite all Muslims against the West while at the same time turning their backs on the Shi'as in order to keep a finger in Iraq.

This is not meant so much to change peoples' stands on immigration, the war, nor is it to bicker about party agendas. Those are debates for another forum... perhaps even on another blog. This is simply a call for responsibility among Americans. For people to think before they make statements or propagate ideas that can hurt our relations with the Islamic world and potentially further endanger the lives of our troops and civilians.